The Confessions of Bill - The New York Review of Books

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By David Bromwich

The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President

by Taylor Branch

Simon and Schuster, 707 pp., $35.00

In the fall of 1993, Taylor Branch agreed with Bill Clinton to conduct occasional interviews on tapes that would be turned into an oral chronicle of the Clinton presidency. The two had been friends more than twenty years earlier in Texas on the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972. Branch, in more recent years, had published the first volume of his trilogy on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and was in the middle of writing the second; the tapes, for him, would be an interruption of planned work, whereas for Clinton they promised to be a flattering record of work in progress. This inequality was balanced by the fact that Branch liked the idea of seeing the President close-up. The two resumed their friendship with ease, and, between October 1993 and March 2001, produced the seventy-nine interviews of which the present book offers a digest.

The arrangement was peculiar in one respect. Clinton kept the tapes, while Branch had to dictate impressions on tapes of his own as he drove back to Baltimore from each visit to the White House. Clinton used the originals to assist in the writing of his memoirs; at some future date, they will probably be open to scholars. This set-up means that Branch's chronicle has not a single extended quotation of Bill Clinton. A sentence every two or three pages is what we get, surrounded by dutiful and often undistinguished paragraphs of summary. Still, Branch has eyes and ears. When he can pause long enough to violate a self-denying ordinance, he also has considerable powers of analysis. Yet an unsuspecting confidence is the pervasive tone—a trust that appears to have continued beyond recorded conversations. Branch sent proofs of the book to Clinton and invited him to suggest nonsubstantive revisions.

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The sprawling summary that makes up The Clinton Tapes follows Clinton's train of associations. One conse-quence of Branch's starting well into Clinton's first year in office is a foreshortened view of the defeat of the President's first project, the legalization of gays in the military, and a minimal treatment of the launching of his second, the initiative to convert the country to a plan of universal health care. The choice of the gay issue as the first of this presidency was improbable in a way Branch does not quite seem to grasp. Though an obvious next step in toleration, it was sure to be controversial, and remote from the centrist spirit in which Clinton had run his campaign. It could be relied on to bring back the acrimonious battles of the 1980s.

David Mixner and other leaders of the gay community had advised him against taking up the cause so early. Clinton drove ahead in spite of their advice, and gave a taste of victory to enemies who would prove relentless. There would be other casualties from this early defeat. Clinton thought of appointing Senator Sam Nunn as secretary of defense in 1996, but the memory of photographs of Nunn touring a navy ship and shivering at the prospect of gay sailors in such close quarters assured a veto of his nomination by the liberal wing of the party.

On universal health care, Branch misses the drama of attrition and anti-climax by which the President's soaring commitments were abridged week by week until the concept expired. This series of capitulations was the source of many people's later suspicion that Bill Clinton was fond of the language of principle but would finally compromise on almost anything. Again, the character of his performance on health care, and his handing it to his wife to add to her luster, seemed to confirm the rumors that the President's conduct was shaded by cronyism and his demeanor slack and self-indulgent. He was said to run policymaking at the White House as a series of inspired bull sessions: an impression successfully planted by Bob Woodward in The Agenda. Branch faithfully registers Clinton's irritation at that partial portrait and, without exactly refuting it, convinces us that the reality was far more intricate. He quotes Clinton saying later that he should have "started with a small piece of health reform" and been content to profit from whatever public good might follow.

About the time Branch settled into his irregular White House routine, the President was considering the appointment of a politician to the Supreme Court. He wanted to break the solid streak of lawyers and judges. Mario Cuomo, Bruce Babbitt, and, in the following year, George Mitchell were all seriously considered, but Cuomo turned it down; Babbitt, after a tantalizing pause, was told that his regional influence was needed at the Department of the Interior; and Mitchell withdrew his name out of loyalty to the President's need for Democratic numbers in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Clinton already found himself dogged by old enemies from Arkansas. He was sure the Whitewater controversy would die down since there was nothing to the charges. But Cliff Jackson and Sheffield Nelson, "both of whom," Branch says, had "turned from Democrats to failed Republican candidates" in Arkansas, had time on their hands and a shot at getting their names in the papers. "They don't have anything else going in their lives," said Clinton, "but trying to bring me down." He surrendered early to the demand for an independent prosecutor because he felt so secure about the innocuousness of the case. This was a large misjudgment. He had underestimated the malice, the wildness, and the persistence of his enemies. These portents coincided with the emergence of Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America—a gimmick whose crude appeal to an old anti- federalism brought a midterm Republican takeover of both houses of Congress in November 1994.

That Clinton was able to ride out that storm was the first convincing show of his mastery. The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, also served as a reminder to the more genteel of his accusers that the pleasure of hating Clinton made for a sport that could go over the edge. The virulence of the anti-government forces of that time is brought out by Branch's recollections here: even Clinton's statements after Oklahoma City on the importance of respect for government were widely taken to be one more piece of opportunism. And once the grimness of the event was absorbed, the Republicans in Congress held hearings not on Oklahoma City but on the abuse of federal power in the FBI assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco.

Taylor Branch admires Clinton within reason, but when there are two sides to an argument he is apt to see things from Clinton's point of view. He conveys well the vituperative rage of the Republicans at Clinton's theft of their "small is better" programs and the anti-government rhetoric that had been their sole argumentative resource. The climactic episode here was the repeal of much of the welfare system and the substitution of work requirements: a decision on which Branch comments too briefly. The rejection of welfare precipitated, as Clinton knew it would, a break with veterans of the civil rights movement, such as Marion Wright Edelman, who had been his friends for two decades. When Clinton reversed his liberal commitments, he found high-sounding reasons to do so, as well as one good party reason: it would take the issue away from the Republicans forever. But no one doubted at the time that he did it to buy insurance for the 1996 election, which he was already favored to win. This fact Branch does not omit but plays down.

Of Russia in the early years of his presidency, as of Bosnia and Kosovo in the later years, little is heard in Branch's summary of the tapes. It is rare to see a show of passion from the President away from domestic policy. Yet Clinton flares with anger when he thinks about Saddam Hussein—a puzzling contrast (as Branch portrays it) with his almost genial acceptance of the tyranny of Suharto. The leader of Iraq is the only person in these pages whom Clinton will be heard to say he hates. He hates him, Clinton says, for what he has done to his people. Yet there is something heartless in Clinton's own remarks about the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the botched American missile attack of June 26, 1993. He had ordered the bombing of Iraqi intelligence headquarters in retaliation for a supposed plot against the life of George H.W. Bush; three of twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles went astray and killed Iraqis who lived nearby. "I regret the loss of life," Clinton tells Branch for the record. "His tone was wooden and mechanical," Branch comments, "with barely a trace of feeling, but he repeated the phrase several times." A similar tone of calculation is audible as Clinton considers the politics of an American operation to restore the govern- ment of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. "When the first soldier dies, I'm a dead duck."

Clinton was baffled by the press coverage that made his smallest move appear drenched in cynicism and his remotest associations corrupt or devious. Reports like those by Jeff Gerth in The New York Times on Whitewater and later on Wen Ho Lee, the alleged smuggler of nuclear secrets—sensational exposures that would come to be largely discredited—were damaging to the minimal reputation for probity without which a politician cannot be trusted to act. Clinton saw the Times and The Washington Post as the heart of the problem. By their pursuit of scandals, they gave permission to the tabloids lower down the ladder, and he said with some justice: "I think these papers have corrupted themselves over Whitewater." The reporters and columnists alike made the most of any hint of purposeful alliance between the President and his wife. They were no less satisfied to transmit the slightest suggestion of marital discord.

Branch's record suggests that the political intelligence shared by Bill and Hillary Clinton was perhaps more interesting and flexible than either separately commands. The American press lacked the wit for a single reporter to discover this; yet it comes out unmistakably in several interludes of The Clinton Tapes. Consider Hillary's account (on her way to bed) of a day's business in the health care debate, where a surgeon has testified that government does nothing to assist Medicare. "She and the president," writes Branch, "completed each other's sentences in a chortling spoof of doctrinaire contradictions in medical policy." One of them trots out the slogan that "no American could be denied quality health care," and the other adds, "but no one was required to pay." The Clintons enjoyed each other's quickness and shared a familiar scorn for time-wasters.

The establishment press ended by finding Bill Clinton not so much elusive as empty. His wife's political ambition, as shown by her run for the Senate in 2000, and the sympathy with which he worked to advance it were taken as proof of a quality somehow worse than ambition in himself. What could that be? At this distance, it is barely possible to reconstruct the grounds for the continuous heat of jeering sarcasm that issued from Howell Raines, William Safire, and Maureen Dowd at the Times, and from Len Downie, Sally Quinn, and David Broder at the Post. The lightheaded meanness of the attitude carried over to their disdain for Gore in 2000, and influenced a jocular acceptance of Bush. This was true not only of the credulity toward the Whitewater charges and Paula Jones, but regarding smaller scandals as well, from the firing of agents at the White House travel office to the false rumor of vandalism by the Clinton staff on their departure in 2001.

The mood of the press was contagious: it was taken up by Louis Freeh at the FBI and led, in the worst miscarriage of all the crowd of accusations, to the indictment by a special prosecutor of Henry Cisneros, secretary of housing and urban development, for eighteen felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The prosecutor there would end by settling for a guilty plea on a single misdemeanor; but the career of Cisneros had been effectively stopped.

As for the Paula Jones civil suit, Judge Susan Wright ruled, as Branch reminds us, on April 1, 1998, that Jones "had no case for sexual harassment even under her version of the facts." The Republicans went ahead with impeachment, unembarrassed. Once they had Monica Lewinsky in their sights, they calculated that salacious curiosity would stir up energy sufficient to cover the flimsiness of Jones's legal case. At this late date, Clinton's friends were still anxious on his behalf about Whitewater, but he was unworried. "If Starr had gleaned even a pea-shooter's case from those thickets," Clinton said, "it would have been fired long ago." His view was hardly disinterested, but his verdict on the investigations is impossible to dispute: "I trusted the press. I trusted the Congress. I trusted the courts. And I was wrong on all counts."

Yet through all that hunt of obloquy, Bill Clinton was strangely passive. Maybe, in 1997, when Branch reports having found him abstracted and reticent, Clinton was taking the measure of his enemies and wondering whether his lapse with a White House intern would eventually lend the other charges a post facto credibility. But on the whole, it seems fairest to see Clinton's preference for cunning over aggression as part of a temperamental adaptability. If this was a weakness, it went with his most basic appetite. "He loved politics so much," Branch sums up, "that he could speak almost fondly of his own defeats."

This made Clinton sometimes emollient beyond what was required by the occasion. He commiserated, for example, with Yitzhak Rabin, during the Oslo process, about how hard it must be for an Israeli soldier to talk to Yasser Arafat. Rabin had no need for such a show of concern. "After all," he told Clinton, "we don't need to make peace with our friends." Clinton himself was always forgiving when he saw an enemy on the point of becoming a friend. He was tickled by a letter he received, in early days at the White House, from Richard Nixon about Russia. Clinton pronounced it "brilliant" and was moved to praise Nixon extravagantly at his funeral.

Clinton's Middle Class Bill of Rights—featuring tax deductions for education—was proposed in December 1994 to counter his midterm defeat; it was a step too far in conciliation for Branch. And as he records, Clinton himself expressed contempt for the bright idea even as he wielded it. Mixed with that feeling must have been also a trace of self-contempt. Branch here reports a rare intervention. He told the President that the idea was nothing but pandering—"seducing voters to feel good by running down the government." Clinton replied bitterly that

the voters were sovereign.... They were the boss. He would give them what they wanted, even if it was stupid.... He would imitate Republican salesmanship to give the voters a borrowed gift. To do so, he would make middle-class tax cuts the centerpiece of his legislative program [in 1995].

In this case, as in Clinton's refusal to hit back against Jesse Helms after Helms said the President would not be safe on any army base in North Carolina, Branch thought that Clinton made a misjudgment in trying to strike an attitude above the battle. Yet Clinton was capable in fact of speaking with affection even about Helms. He enjoyed rapprochements with Robert Dole, Trent Lott, Alan Simpson, and others who "poisoned in jest" as part of everyday politics. They, in turn, marveled at Clinton's ability to absorb blows, come off the ropes, and win the next round in an unspectacular way.

A certain fatigue with Clinton's view of things may set in, three of four hundred pages into the Tapes, when one realizes that he estimates half the public persons in the world as politicians. It is hard to imagine another president saying of Pope John Paul II, after seeing him fetch applause from a crowd: "I sure as hell would hate to be running against him for mayor anywhere." But Clinton simply had an unreserved love of the game of politics. This made it possible for him to respect Fritz Hollings's mordant attack on his attempt to cook up drum rolls and little fanfares of "bipartisanship" over balancing the budget. As Branch relates Clinton's own appreciative summary:

We Democrats, Hollings nearly shouted, did all the heavy lifting back in 1993 without a single Republican vote in either chamber of Congress. Fidelity to that measure had eliminated 77 percent of the deficit already, by his calculation, with the remainder soon to be wiped out whether they adopted a five-year agreement or not. So why on earth would Clinton share any credit with Republicans? Did he remember summoning Democrats to walk the plank for this? How could any president spit on their sacrifice and uphold the party cohesion to survive? Was he running a political charity.

It is an earnest voice, and candid, the voice of a fighter who knows that it is honorable to hold a grudge against a scoundrel. It is the very tone that people always missed in Clinton himself.

Branch is scrupulous in noting his worries about whether he may have gotten too close to his subject. He was right to turn down Clinton's request that he become a friendly in-house historian, much as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been for President Kennedy. True, Branch stepped in from the sidelines to assist Clinton with communications that might lead to the bloodless return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti. Branch was a close friend of Aristide. But this is hardly an impediment to accurate reporting, and the narrative of the resolution of the Haiti crisis in 1994 is memorable for one significant detail: the irritation Clinton felt toward Jimmy Carter, which soon turned to gratitude for Carter's role in assuring the exiled president's safe passage home.

In commoner exchanges over Clinton's work as president, a conventional note of pride of association clouds Branch's judgment only once. He is greatly concerned in 1997 that Clinton should do more than promise (in a dozen insipid variations) a "bridge to the twenty-first century." In the end, Branch gets one of his own sentences into the second inaugural: "Guided by the ancient vision of a promised land, let us set our sights upon a land of new promise." Looking at it now, he must recognize that it could pass for a sentence spoken by Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan.

The last hundred pages are the best of The Clinton Tapes. Maybe Clinton in his final year in office spoke more easily; in any case, the narrative has a sharper focus now, and the anecdotes fall into a characteristic rhythm:

The president was eating a bowl of bran in January. He said Bob Squier, the campaign consultant, never had a colonoscopy in his life. They diagnosed him six months ago, and he died today at sixty-five. The end comes on quickly if you don't catch it early. "I always eat bran when a friend dies of colon cancer," Clinton said.

Two subjects dominate the last several interviews: the conclusion of the impeachment and the Camp David negotiations on Palestine between Ehud Barak and Arafat. Clinton seems to have been more optimistic about his chances for acquittal than about the possibility of brokering an honest peace between Israel and Palestine. In July 2000, he is unusually reluctant, for reasons that are obscure, to speak at all about the negotiations. The reason may lie partly in accusations of anti-Semitism suffered a few months earlier by Hillary Clinton in her Senate campaign. Such pressures work in complex ways; and the want of analysis by Branch is disappointing; but he gives enough material for others to work on.

As far back as Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign to become prime minister in 1996, Clinton had been fearful of the mixing of the politics of the United States and Israel; in February of that year, he spoke of Netanyahu as someone who

opposed the peace alliance on both sides of the Atlantic. While he legitimately attacked Peres in the Israeli campaign—emphasizing the danger of potential concessions to Syria—his Likud agents in the United States joined Republicans eager to stir up suspicions against Clinton's Middle East diplomacy.... [Clinton] called it scandalous electioneering by and with a foreign political party.

Branch's account of the fraying negotiations between Barak and Arafat contains an unexpected comment by Clinton about his final attempt to get an agreement in December 2000. Clinton put forward his proposal for a deal—accepted by Israel, rejected by Arafat—which would give "94–96" percent of the West Bank to the new Palestinian state. A generous offer, irrationally spurned, it might appear, yet Clinton came to think in retrospect that

Barak misplayed it. Who could say for sure, because the signals were so coded and circumscribed on all three sides? Still, those last terms presented by Clinton should have made Barak say no. They were too hard for Israel. They went too far on the territories and Jerusalem. Then perhaps Arafat could say yes to the terms that had made Israel balk. Only then might Barak have closed the deal by changing his mind....

Barak said yes too fast, Clinton feared. He had nothing left to give, and Arafat's instinct when offered 100 percent was to demand 120.... In all their pirouettes, they should have found a way to let the head of a functioning state make the last concession, or look like it, anyway.

About the aim and object of Clinton's conduct in the negotiations—at a period that the Gaza onslaught has rendered almost unimaginable—Branch leaves nothing finally clear. It is an exaggeration to say that a map of a country (however autonomous) so checked and split was 100 percent of what Arafat had dared to hope for. Yet Clinton's perception of the dialectic by which, in a negotiation between unequal powers, the stronger must not be seen either to back off austerely or to jump forward too quickly, shows the acuteness that made his political insight a ponderable force to the end. The unhappy truth is that many of his best thoughts are afterthoughts. It will take a later historian to compare the possible correlations between Clinton's waning influence as an outgoing president, Hillary Clinton's campaign in New York, Barak's late move to rescind his offer of the Golan Heights to Syria, and Arafat's eventual rejection of the offer of contiguous and substantial territories on the West Bank.

How was Clinton able at once to govern and to observe, with a semblance of detachment, the trial that almost drove him out of the presidency? A mood of oppression may sometimes be detected in the tapes made during the impeachment; but even then his spirits veer upward to gallows humor and a strange sort of exhilaration. "Surreal" is Branch's word for the fact that the President's approval ratings stayed above 60 percent even as impeachment was voted and the argument about details of the charges began to build.

Clinton at this time would say for the record: "I am utterly convinced that history will vindicate me, and will record that my opponents have damaged the country." Truer to the man and his love of the game is an incident that makes the most memorable tableau in the book. Clinton is talking on the phone, hearing that his approval ratings have stayed high, and proclaiming his "merry wish to keep the impeachment trial going another month." But why? Heavy contributions from small donors are coming to the Democratic Party as never before; Clinton continues on the phone with the DNC chair, Steve Grossman, and remarks on the side to Branch: "I will be very surprised, and crushed, if we do not win the House of Representatives in 2000."

In his last sessions, Bill Clinton wished that Al Gore had waged a less decorous campaign in 2000, and not run away from Clinton's record. His view here is self-serving but also canny. Had he been allowed to campaign for Gore, he might indeed have helped him to win New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Arkansas. He also shared the common judgment that Gore was wrong to let his people concentrate on a few disputed jurisdictions in Florida; a recount of the legal votes in the entire state would have carried a surer mark of conviction. Speaking on November 27, 2000, Clinton asserted his view that

the US Supreme Court would do anything it could to help Bush. He wasn't sure how the justices could get a legal foothold, but he said they were political enough to engineer a conservative president in order to perpetuate justices like themselves.... In summary, President Clinton said all the major institutional forces were lined up behind Bush, except for the Florida Supreme Court. He specifically included the media. Therefore, it would be very difficult for Gore to win.

This prediction Branch calls "prophetic." It was certainly correct in its estimate of the alignment of forces and in its inference of the result.

Which Way for Hamas? - The New York Review of Books

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By Nicolas Pelham, Max Rodenbeck

Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement

by Zaki Chehab

Nation Books, 250 pp., $15.95 (paper)

Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence

by Jeroen Gunning

Columbia University Press, 310 pp., $34.50

Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas

by Paul McGeough

New Press, 477 pp., $26.95

1.

Amid the wreckage of Gaza, Hamas's officials struggle to sound upbeat. The burly interior minister, Fathi Hamad, whose predecessor was killed by an Israeli bomb, defiantly shuns security precautions at his makeshift office in Gaza City's main police station. "Claims that we are trying to establish an Islamic state are false," says the minister, who says his preference would be pursuing a degree in media studies. "Hamas is not the Taliban. It is not al-Qaeda. It is an enlightened, moderate Islamic movement."

Such talk is not the only effort to return to normality. Parasols and beach cabins sprouted this summer along Gaza's twenty-eight miles of sandy shore, the crowded strip's principal public park. Two buildings of the Islamic University, Hamas's most prominent educational institution, had been bombed but the university put on a graduation ceremony with festive lights, a cascade of multicolored balloons, and heart-shaped posters wishing future success to its students, most of whom happen to be women and some of whom flashed jeans and high heels beneath their black gowns. In a theater next to the Palestinian parliament, also shattered by bombs, actresses danced and writhed in the government-sponsored premiere of Gaza's Girls and the Patience of Job.

Such events reflect one side of the ongoing conflict inside Hamas between the pragmatists who put Gazans' needs first, and have sought to lighten their lives after years of punishing blockade and intermittent war, and the ideologues who give priority to "the rule of the sharia of God on earth." Advocates of the latter have tried to apply Islamic law in full, appealing to the Gaza-based and Hamas-controlled Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to replace the British Mandate–era penal code with a sharia law that provides execution for apostasy, stoning and lashing for adultery, and the payment of blood money counted in camels. So far, the pragmatists have largely frustrated their efforts. "You can't Islamize the law when the political system is not fully Islamic," says the PLC's general director, Nafiz al-Madhoun, who completed a doctorate in law at the University of Minnesota, and once lectured there. "You need to have an Islamic government, judiciary, and political system. And we don't."

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In response, the ideologues have resorted to other means, introducing sharia by the back door. With the help of Hamas mosques, the Religious Endowments Ministry has commissioned a morality police to "Propagate Virtue and Prevent Vice," not least by patrolling the beaches for such signs of debauchery as unveiled female bathers and shirtless men. The police have set up arbitration committees in their stations, offering detainees a fast-track resolution by fatwas, or legal opinion, which sometimes comes from the Muslim Scholars League. "The law of God or the law of a judge?" the police have asked petitioners. The Education Ministry insists it has issued no requirement that schoolgirls wear the jilbab, the shapeless body-wrap, but at the start of the school year, some principals did.

The Islamic Resistance Movement (in Arabic, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya—hence Hamas) remains powerful, but nearly four years after winning the 2006 elections, and two years after its gunmen overpowered Palestinian Authority (PA) forces to seize control of the strip, Hamas no longer acts like an opposition suddenly thrust into power. Silent a year ago, the Ministry of National Economy now negotiates with entrepreneurs seeking licenses for their latest project. The ministry's small-business scheme offers interest-free loans for such things as a $5,000 freezer to put a butcher back in business. The Local Affairs Ministry runs a licensing office for the tunnels to Egypt that remain Gaza's lifeline; the Public Works Ministry is repaving roads with smuggled tar; the Foreign Ministry has commissioned an American journalist to train diplomats; and the Finance Ministry is collecting taxes with increased rigor. A comprehensive Web site (www.diwan.ps) gives details of government appointments and decrees, with greater transparency than the PA, Hamas's counterpart in Ramallah that once ran both parts of the Palestinians' territory, but now runs the West Bank alone, and that under an Israeli thumb.

Hamas has revamped the civil service, pruning departments that under the bloated PA had more undersecretaries than clerical secretaries. Initial protests by Fatah loyalists after Hamas's takeover in June 2007 gave Gaza's new masters an excuse to lower pay grades and shed jobs. "It was a gift from God. Most were already redundant," according to an Interior Ministry official who says he has cut his twelve-member staff (including nine directors-general) by a third. With government salaries paid promptly, most of the time, Gazans make use of strike-free municipal services, including buses and schools. Should Gaza again have a functioning railway, Hamas would run trains on time.

International attempts to isolate Hamas have also helped instead to entrench the Islamists. With all but the most basic goods banned from Gaza, smuggling has thrived through supply lines that Hamas controls. Since 2006, despite Israeli bombing and increasingly effective Egyptian policing, the number of tunnels has grown from a few score to over a thousand. "The siege has empowered those the international community wanted to disempower," a Gazan businessman observed.

Of the nearly 30,000 people the authorities say have received jobs since the party took power, some 25,000 are in the security forces. "You can dial 100 and the police come," a banker said. "Under the PA, police were afraid of thieves, now the thieves are afraid of them." Before the Hamas takeover, says another, he and his friends chose their most battered car when they went to a restaurant, for fear of car thefts. This summer, the jammed streets were full of new cars, a tacit rebuke to Israel's two-year ban on vehicle imports.

The internal calm is matched by an external reprieve. When Israel withdrew in January, leaving 1,387 Gazans dead (according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem), thousands homeless, and factories, schools, and infrastructure smashed, Hamas hailed its survival as a great victory. But Israel imposed its own terms, forcing Hamas to quietly drop demands that Israel lift the blockade before Hamas stopped lobbing rockets at the Jewish state. While the range of Hamas's rockets has increased from fifteen to forty kilometers, bringing Tel Aviv suburbs within reach, Hamas has, since the end of the Israeli incursion, fired rockets rarely if ever, and restrained Islamist rivals, such as Islamic Jihad, from doing the same. Between March 17 and September 22 Gazans fired some eighteen short-range rockets without loss of life. Israel has responded with incursions and sometimes fatal bombings. In effect, Hamas now acts as Israel's border guard, preventing further attacks. Israel's swap of twenty female Palestinian prisoners for the first video footage of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier Hamas captured three years ago, has raised guarded hopes in Gaza of a bigger deal to come. In exchange for Shalit, according to Hamas leaders, Israel will soon release hundreds of Israel's ten thousand Palestinian prisoners and might even relax the siege.

To the south too, Hamas hints of better times ahead. Whereas in 2008 Hamas brashly punched a hole through Egypt's border defenses, unleashing an embarrassing stampede of Palestinians into Egyptian shops, Interior Minister Hamad says Hamas now "coordinates fully" with Gaza's sole Arab neighbor. Hamas even poses as a guardian of Egypt's national security, not least by killing al-Qaeda's self-proclaimed preachers and other adherents in Gaza. "Our task now is governance, to consolidate stability rather than continue resistance," says Hamad.

Yet a day after speaking these soothing words, the interior minister offered a very different political horizon. Between towering bodyguards from Hamas's armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, he delivered an apocalyptic address to a summoned assembly of clan elders. It was angels that chased Israel's army from Gaza in last winter's war, he thundered, adding with a numerological flourish that whereas Israel beat twenty-two Arab nations, Gaza's Islamic resistance had routed the enemy in just twenty-two days. The Jewish state, he concluded, would disappear in 2022.

Such reverses in rhetoric reveal a movement struggling to reconcile two competing audiences: the "international community," which calls for Hamas to be more moderate, and a core constituency that grows suspicious at any sign it might be selling out. Much as Communist regimes tacked "Democratic" to their names to disguise totalitarianism, Hamas officials use the word "resistance" to hide the waning of their armed struggle. The culture minister, when he attends theatrical productions, speaks of Resistance Culture. The minister of economy hails recent openings of cafés and restaurants as triumphs of the Resistance Economy. "As long as we don't raise our hands in surrender and continue to struggle, that's resistance," he said.

Hamas has failed to achieve the prime requisite for a more normal life: ending the siege. Gaza under Islamist rule is a cul-de-sac. Air and sea routes are blocked. Only the very sick, wounded, or well connected are allowed passage through sporadically opened land crossings to Israel and Egypt. Few now even bother to attempt the humiliating process of crossing the border, either with Israel or Egypt. "You can't board an Egypt Air plane to get home via Cairo without a fax from Egyptian intelligence," a Gazan graduate of Harvard Business School said.

While some Gazans profit from the boom in contraband, most people have seen their savings, salaries, and businesses atrophy. For all the talk about entrepreneurs, nine tenths now live below the poverty line, according to the UN, which estimates that living standards have plummeted to pre-1967 levels. In Israel per capita GDP is $27,450; in Gaza it's two or three dollars a day. Even merchant families collect UN rations.

If war and siege have not crippled Hamas, Gaza's misery appears to have prompted its greater willingness to compromise and offer its people a political future. Hamas leaders, including the more outspoken exiled leadership based in Damascus, have lately muted criticism of Fatah in the interest of intra-Palestinian reconciliation—even after Abbas's Palestinian Authority reportedly bowed to Israeli pressure and withdrew its demand for UN action against Israel following Justice Richard Goldstone's UN report into war crimes by the belligerents in Gaza's winter war. They have played down the significance of their party's fiery founding charter, which rejects any recognition of Israel, hinting that they could live with a two-state settlement. In its draft laws, Hamas defines "Palestine" not as the area including Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza but as the geographical district over which the Palestinian National Authority rules. As leaders of Fatah did a generation earlier, some members have discreetly met with Israelis at international conferences, talking peace over breakfast. In addition, within its own fiefdom Hamas's leaders have decided to suspend declaration of an Islamist state and application of sharia, and to focus on the economy instead.

Such changes in position are offensive to Hamas's hard-core followers. For what have they struggled, if not for establishing God's kingdom on earth? Rumors in Gaza reinforce the image of a leadership straying from the straight path. Businessmen working with Hamas are said to be investing tunnel profits in renovating plush hotels, prompting some to speak of an emerging Hamas oligarchy. A minister's son reportedly deals in drugs, and the son of a Qassam commander smokes water pipes. The security forces, too, seem to be following the pattern of the region's self-serving police states. Hamas used to threaten external foes and defend its own people, say Gaza's whisperers. Now it does just the reverse.

After Friday prayers on an August afternoon, Abdel Latif Moussa, a preacher in Rafah, the principal town on the Egyptian border, addressed scores of armed supporters. If Hamas did not have the guts to declare Gaza an Islamic emirate, he said, then he would do so, right here and now. Within hours of Moussa's sermon, masked fighters from Hamas's Qassam Brigades surged into the neighborhood. Among the twenty-eight killed were Moussa himself and several Qassam fighters, some felled by the first recorded instance of intra-Palestinian suicide bombing.

This was by no means Hamas's first sign of ruthlessness toward fellow Palestinians. During the first intifada against Israeli rule, which erupted soon after Hamas's official founding in 1987, its nascent armed wing targeted suspected collaborators, prostitutes, and drug dealers as often as it did Israelis. Islamists had long clashed with Fatah activists they called "traitorous" before Hamas's 2007 putsch against them, which culminated in street fighting that left more than one hundred dead. Since then the Qassam Brigades have sprayed gunfire at Fatah demonstrators and knee-capped Fatah organizers until they stopped demonstrating. They have laid siege to rebellious quarters of hostile clans and lobbed rocket-propelled grenades inside until family elders agreed to surrender.

But during August's shoot-out in Rafah, Hamas was not fighting "traitors," but rather its own brothers—people who prayed at the same mosques, studied the same texts, tapped the same financial backers, and used much the same terminology that Hamas used to overthrow Fatah. Such ultra-puritan Islamists are broadly known as Salafists, adherents of a belief system originating in Saudi Arabia that seeks to replicate fully the practices of the Prophet's companions.

Some Salafists have sought to infiltrate the ranks of Hamas, where they find fertile ground for recruits, particularly in its armed wing. Others have fused their search for purity with a jihadist challenge to the established order. Some eschew politics altogether, limiting their activities to preaching. Though dedicated to eliminating foreign influence, their teachers are among Gaza's most widely traveled, having studied in South Africa, Pakistan, Yemen, and Europe. Moussa had studied under such teachers in the Khan Yunis town, before shifting to the jihadist track.

Cracks emerged when Hamas drifted from social activism and armed struggle into politics. After Hamas decided to contest the 2006 elections, one of its preachers in Rafah left the movement with scores of followers. God's will above man's, he said, and besides Hamas had no business participating in an authority established by agreement with Israel. During the contentious interregnum of national unity government before Hamas's takeover of Gaza in June 2007, both Fatah and Hamas solicited Salafist support. Unruly clans seeking an Islamist cover to press their claims bolstered their ranks. Amid the chaos, the Salafists sought to enforce their authority by waging a nasty morality campaign against Internet cafés, hairdressers, the American school, and other such places of ill-repute.

Armed confrontation with the Salafists followed fast on the heels of Hamas's takeover. In July 2007 the Qassam Brigades laid siege to the stronghold of one jihadist group, the Army of Islam, forcing the release of the BBC's kidnapped correspondent Alan Johnston.

In the months that followed, Hamas fought to extend its control, sending the members of the Army of Islam fleeing to other towns. There they sought to rally support among discontents, challenging Hamas's legitimacy with harder-line Islamist rhetoric that accused it of selling out both on its application of sharia and its resistance against Israel. They set up new cells, variously claiming affiliation with al-Qaeda and ridding Gaza of idolatry with such acts as removing the statue of Palestine's unknown soldier from Gaza City's central square.

One of the largest factions, the jaljalat—Arabic for "the reverberations of thunder"—acquired significant support inside Hamas, and sought to target high-profile visitors to Gaza, reportedly including former President Jimmy Carter. Jund Ansar Allah, the Army of God's Companions, led by Moussa, was a relatively new addition. Its operations included a cavalry charge by white stallions intended to emulate early Muslim warriors, notwithstanding the landmines on Israel's fortified border. Qassam Brigades stormed a house in the Khan Yunis refugee camp used by the Jund in mid-July, uncovering money, weapons, and explosive belts. Soon after, a bomb blasted the wedding of a nephew of Fatah's former strongman in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, wounding sixty-one. It was after this that Qassam forces targeted Moussa's base in Rafah, the Jund's strongest redoubt with its easy access to tunnels and regional support. Salafists fleeing Rafah found refuge further north, sparking more clashes around Gaza City when Hamas sought to capture them. In two days, Hamas officials said they detained 250 Islamists.

In an attempt to deflect a Salafist backlash, Hamas officials have made a show of honoring the Jund's dead as martyrs, along with their own. They have sought to reaffirm their Islamist credentials with a morality campaign called Fadila, or Virtue, intended to tighten the Islamists' spiritual grip. The Religious Affairs ministry has hired seven hundred new employees to regulate public mores, by such actions as checking couples' marriage licenses.

A sense of unease is again enveloping Gaza. Ramadan, a time of festivity, proved desultory, and not just because of the siege. In what is Hamas's greatest security breach to date, Salafist Web sites published hit lists of Hamas members, detailing their rank in the movement, their tunnel hideouts, and mosques where they can be targeted. Jihadist spiritual mentors did not endorse calls for revenge attacks, and some instead urged unity and calm. But Gaza's streets and mosques were noticeably more subdued after the Rafah bloodshed. Hamas checkpoints—which had all but disappeared from the Gaza Strip—reappeared in the heart of Gaza City, sometimes during daylight hours. The few foreigners Israel allows to visit, who for months had experienced a brief respite, relaxing on its beaches and Web surfing in its wi-fi-equipped cafés, now tend to venture into Gaza in armored cars.

Hamas's resilience and ingenuity in the face of intense challenges are a largely untold success story. But its drive for a monopoly of power has swept aside the consensus-building that exemplified Palestinian politics and replaced it with a one-party statelet. Few believe Hamas wants elections anytime soon. Despite the lip service they pay to the electoral process, its leaders are wary of the large part of the Palestinian public that sullenly blames them for prolonging Gaza's troubles.

Without elections there is scant outlet for organized civil dissent. Opponents seeking to hold Gaza's authorities to internal account have few means but force. Hamas claims that it has crushed "the deviants," but in doing so it has deployed the same mosque-storming tactics Fatah once used against it, arousing scorn over its methods. In the absence of a more inclusive approach, Hamas's greatest achievement—the restoration of Gaza's stability—sometimes feels as bittersweet a prize to ordinary Palestinians as the "victory" it claims over the Zionist enemy.

2.

In a sense, Hamas has become captive to its own success as it struggles now to reconcile the pressing needs of day-to-day governance with the ideology it preached in opposition, and to reconcile as well its Palestinian cause with its wider Islamic one, and its cult of guns and martyrdom with more pragmatic instincts. As several useful new books on Hamas reveal, such gnawing internal tensions are inherent in the approach that Islamists have adopted to the question of Palestine from its very origins. Seeing the "cause" in millennial terms, as part of a universal struggle, the faith-based movement has badly damaged a polity that was fragile and inchoate before the implantation of Israel, and has struggled mightily to remain unified ever since.

Although Hamas itself is not yet a quarter-century old, it is important to recall that the earliest armed resistance to Zionist colonization was not nationalist, but rather pan-Islamist in inspiration. In his gossip- and fact-packed book Inside Hamas, Zaki Chehab, a pro-Fatah Palestinian journalist, reminds us that the namesake of Hamas's Qassam Brigades was, in fact, a Syrian who was educated at Cairo's al-Azhar University. When France occupied Syria in 1920, Ezzedine Qassam briefly led an armed cell, but soon fled to the safety of British-occupied Palestine. As a mosque preacher in Haifa he witnessed the surge in Jewish immigration that followed Hitler's rise, and began a clandestine campaign to arm Muslim fighters.

Qassam himself was "martyred" by British troops in 1935, at the start of the Palestine Revolt, and then largely forgotten until his memory was revived by Hamas. The uprising he helped inspire was eventually crushed by the British, who in the process effectively decapitated the Palestinians' nascent leadership. This weakness, compounded by class tensions within Palestinian society, as well as by the marginalizing of its Druze and Christian minorities, proved fatal ten years later, when the better-led, better-equipped, and desperately determined Jewish Yishuv conquered most of historic Palestine.

The 1948 Nakba, or Calamity, left the Palestinians, still leaderless and now physically dispersed, particularly susceptible to Islamist ideas, and to the romantic notion of guerrilla action. Not only had secular Arab armies proved incapable of defending them, but the success of the Jewish state seemed to present an object lesson in the potential of religion as a political force. The displacement of thousands of Palestinian peasants to refugee camps, meanwhile, created conditions of dislocation, squalor, and unemployment similar to those that were to fan Islamist trends in urban slums across the region.

Not surprisingly, much of the future generation of Palestinian leaders, including Yasser Arafat, entered politics as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fiercely anti-imperialist, pan-Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928. Even before 1948, according to Jeroen Gunning, a British academic whose Hamas in Politics is an exemplary political primer on the Islamist party's evolution, structure, and thought, the Brotherhood was said to have thirty-eight branches in Palestine, with ten thousand members. Ironically, Arafat's founding of Fatah, the secular party that dominated Palestinian politics until the 1990s, was prompted not by a rejection of Islamist ideas but by the Brotherhood's move, under intense and frequently brutal pressure from Arab regimes, to abandon "armed struggle" in the 1950s.

A generation later, the resurgence of Islamism among Palestinians very much paralleled its rise across the wider Muslim world. A first generation of degree holders, many of them engineers and doctors, were radicalized not just by Israel's occupation and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war, but also by the limited room for advancement within Palestinian society. Blaming the Arabs' cosmopolitan elite for their series of defeats, the Islamists sensed their own entitlement to power, both as more authentic representatives of the masses and as the true heirs to a tradition of resistance that they saw as being cultural as much as political.

Paul McGeough, an Australian reporter who has written a fascinating account of the rise of Khaled Meshaal, Hamas's most prominent leader today and the chief of its politburo, quotes him as scoffing at his rivals with the words, "We're the root; Fatah is a mere branch." Even at university in Kuwait in the 1970s, where his mosque-preacher father settled after fleeing his West Bank village in 1967, Meshaal refused to join the existing, Fatah-dominated Palestinian students' union, but insisted on creating a parallel Islamic one. Under his guidance Hamas later refused to join the PLO, the umbrella grouping of Palestinian parties. Hamas also refused to coordinate with others during the 1987–1992 intifada, and refused to participate in national elections before 2005. To the frustration of others it saw itself alone as the Palestinians' rightful leader.

When the Palestinian mainstream moved, during the 1980s, toward compromise with Israel, Islamist factions shifted into outright opposition. While the Muslim Brotherhood had retained a network inside Palestine, based in mosques and student clubs, Khaled Meshaal and a group of younger Islamists in the diaspora had formed a network of their own, collecting funds from Palestinian workers in the wealthy Gulf states. Their dual effort merged in the creation of Hamas. By the time Yasser Arafat signed the first peace deal with the Israeli enemy in 1993, establishing a proto-state under his rule in Gaza and the West Bank, the new party had the means and determination not merely to challenge his course, but to sabotage the entire "peace process."

Its effort, pursued mainly by means of a bloody series of bombings targeting Israeli civilians beginning in 1994, brought Hamas global notoriety but not, at first, much popularity among its own people. For most of that decade, Jeroen Gunning writes, opinion polls rarely showed the Islamists gaining more than 20 percent approval, a level that broadly reflected the performance of similar Islamist parties in other countries. Hamas's slow ascent to victory in the 2006 election came largely as a result of bungling by all of its adversaries.

Indeed, Israel's mishandling of Hamas began even before the group's creation. The Israelis turned a blind eye to recruitment by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s, largely because they saw the Islamists as a foil to nationalist groups. Belatedly alerted to the arming of Hamas cells during the first intifada, Israel increased its appeal by televising the trial of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound Gaza preacher who was Hamas's spiritual head, and then by exiling hundreds of Hamas activists to Lebanon, where they had a useful chance to make contact with fellow Islamists such as Hezbollah.

Hamas's subsequent resort to hideous "martyrdom operations," as suicide bombings were called, owed much to Hezbollah's inspiration and perhaps also to its technical expertise. Israel's response of targeted assassinations hugely bolstered Palestinian sympathy for Hamas, even as it served to radicalize its followers. As Paul McGeough's book makes abundantly clear, for instance, Khaled Meshaal, a relative hard-liner, rode to dominance within Hamas on the wave of outrage that followed Israel's botched attempt to poison him in Amman in 1997. By contrast, when in 2003 Israel succeeded in murdering Ismail Abu Shanab, a respected Gazan intellectual with an engineering degree from Colorado State University, it eliminated a Hamas official who had argued passionately against suicide bombings and in favor of a long-term truce.

Israel's dramatic acceleration of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories during the 1990s, and its systematic undermining of the Palestinian economy by means of roadblocks and closures, convinced many Palestinians that Hamas was perhaps correct in judging the peace process a sham. Even as Yasser Arafat's credit waned among his own people, both Israel and the Clinton administration pushed him to crack down on Hamas. This he did, with some brutality and considerable success, in a campaign that put hundreds of Hamas activists into Palestinian prisons. Yet rather than being rewarded for risking the anger of his own people, Arafat was simply pressured to do more, and told that he would be held to account for any atrocity carried out by Hamas.

In effect if not in intention, Israel handed the Islamists veto power over the peace process. It also so weakened Arafat that when Israel floated the possibility of an offer at Camp David in 2000, the Palestinian leader shied from pursuing it, largely because he feared he could not swing his people to support it. When, in the autumn of 2000, the second intifada broke out in the wake of this failure, Arafat felt obliged to ride the violence rather than attempt to contain it, and soon lost control of his movement as local Fatah activists strove to outdo Hamas in fury.

Arafat was hardly a mere victim. His Fatah party proved just as helpful to Hamas as their mutual enemy. Not only did his suppression of the group smack to many Palestinians of treachery but Arafat's cronies were notoriously corrupt and incompetent. Their handling of the 2006 legislative elections that swept Hamas to power, brilliantly described by Gunning, was almost farcically self-destructive. As Zaki Chehab quotes a Gazan voter telling him at the time, "We don't believe in Hamas's political views, but we want to show the Fatah leadership that we have alternatives."

Yet Hamas may also claim much credit for its success. In stark contrast to Fatah, it has acted with strategic vision, careful planning, and steely discipline. Much of its leadership has deeper local roots, and is generally of a higher caliber: in the cabinet it formed after the 2006 election, no fewer than seven of its twenty-four ministers held advanced degrees from American universities. Politicians such as Meshaal are far more charismatic on television than Arafat's hapless successor, Mahmoud Abbas.

With its clandestine structure of local cells and a dispersed leadership that operates by consensus, Hamas has proved extremely resilient to attack. Despite the bloodiness and apparent futility of its methods in combating Israel, it has shown both a high degree of managerial competence and a responsiveness to Palestinian public opinion that can be surprising for a religiously inspired organization. Yet the need to placate its ideological core, combined with Hamas's evolution of a structure that links Meshaal and his money, safely offshore, directly to Qassam commanders, so bypassing political scrutiny by their less strident colleagues, also builds in rigidity on key issues, most obviously that of peace. Sadly, Hamas's inflexibility has often proved, in the eyes of its constituents, to have been vindicated by events.

Hamas is unlikely to be budged anytime soon from its Gaza stronghold. It is playing a waiting game, hoping that other forces will blink before it does: that the international community will feel shamed into relieving the siege of Gaza, or that Egypt's hostile regime will fall, or that Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel will prove so stingy in its dealings with Mahmoud Abbas that the Fatah government on the West Bank will collapse. But in the meantime Hamas is under pressure to deliver something more than bravado to its people. Perhaps, as Gunning suggests, it will one day admit that its armed struggle against Israel (unlike against its internal rivals) has been largely symbolic, and that its declaration of a divine right to Palestine represents more of a credo than a political program. Gunning declines to judge whether, with regard to hopes for Middle Eastern peace, Hamas is what political science would term an "absolute spoiler," or only a limited one. But as he says, politics is never static, nor are political organizations.

—Gaza and Cairo, October 6, 2009

1989! - The New York Review of Books

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1989!

By Timothy Garton Ash

BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ESSAY

1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe

by Mary Elise Sarotte

Princeton University Press, 321 pp., $29.95

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment

by Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross

Modern Library, 197 pp., $24.00

Der Vorhang Geht Auf: Das Ende der Diktaturen in Osteuropa

by György Dalos

Munich: C.H. Beck, 272 pp., e19.90

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

by Michael Meyer

Scribner, 255 pp., $26.00

Histoire secrète de la chute du mur de Berlin

by Michel Meyer

Paris: Odile Jacob, 348 pp., e21.00 (paper)

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire

by Victor Sebestyen

Pantheon, 451 pp., $30.00

The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989

edited by Jeffrey A. Engel

Oxford University Press, 186 pp., $27.95

There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism

by Constantine Pleshakov

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 289 pp., $26.00

Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War

by Romesh Ratnesar

Simon and Schuster, 240 pp., $27.00

Unsurprisingly, the twentieth anniversary of 1989 has added to an already groaning shelf of books on the year that ended the short twentieth century. If we extend "1989" to include the unification of Germany and disunification of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991, we should more accurately say the three years that ended the century. The anniversary books include retrospective journalistic chronicles, with some vivid personal glimpses and striking details (Victor Sebestyen, György Dalos, Michael Meyer, and Michel Meyer), spirited essays in historical interpretation (Stephen Kotkin and Constantine Pleshakov), and original scholarly work drawing on archival sources as well as oral history (Mary Elise Sarotte and the volume edited by Jeffrey Engel). I cannot review them individually. Most add something to our knowledge; some add quite a lot. It is no criticism of any of these authors to say that I come away dreaming of another book: the global, synthetic history of 1989 that remains to be written.

1.

Over these twenty years, the most interesting new findings have come from Soviet, American, and German archives, and, to a lesser extent, from East European, British, and French ones. They throw light mainly on the high politics of 1989–1991. Thus, for example, we find that the Soviet Politburo did not even discuss Germany on November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall would come down, but instead heard a panicky report from Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov about preparations for secession in the Baltic states and their possible effects in Ukraine and Russia. "I smell an overall collapse," said Ryzhkov.

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It is remarkable to read the fulsome welcome Mikhail Gorbachev's adviser Anatoly Chernyaev gives in his diary on November 10 to the fall of the Berlin Wall: "This is what Gorbachev has done.... He has sensed the pace of history and helped history to find a natural channel." And it is shaming, for an Englishman, to learn how shamelessly Margaret Thatcher seems to have betrayed her public promises to Germany. "The words written in the NATO communique may sound different, but disregard them," she apparently told Gorbachev in September 1989, according to a note of their conversation prepared by Chernyaev. "We do not want the unification of Germany." (Sarotte also obtained the British record of this conversation, using Britain's Freedom of Information Act. She notes that "it did not contain these comments, but it was redacted.")

So, in a classic Rankean advance of historical scholarship, we know more than we did at the time about these traditionally documented areas of high politics. By contrast, we have learned little new about the causes and social dynamics of the mass, popular actions that actually gave 1989 a claim to be a revolution, or chain of revolutions.

I spent many hours of my life standing in those crowds, in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague; their behavior was both inspiring and mysterious. What had moved these individual men and women to come out on the streets, especially in the early days, when it was not self-evidently safe to do so? What swayed them as a crowd? Who, in Prague, was the first to take a key ring out of his or her pocket, hold the keys aloft, and shake them—an action that, copied by 300,000 people, produced the most amazing sound, like massed Chinese bells?

Historians such as George Rudé, with his pioneering study of the crowd in the French Revolution, E.P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm have attempted to understand the underlying dynamics of popular protest in earlier periods. It is surely time for contemporary historians, with better sources at their disposal (hours of television, video, and radio footage, for example), to take up the challenge of trying to analyze 1989 from below, and not merely from above.

Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened "hindsight bias"—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time (for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe).^[1] What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson talked of "the illusions of retrospective determinism." Explanations are then offered for what happened. As one scholar commented a few years after 1989: no one foresaw this, but everyone could explain it afterward. Reading these books, I was again reminded of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski's "law of the infinite cornucopia," which states that an infinite number of explanations can be found for any given event.

A great virtue of Mary Elise Sarotte's 1989 is that she makes the problem of hindsight bias explicit, and systematically explores the roads not taken. She reminds us, for example, how close East Germany may have come to bloodshed in Leipzig on October 9, 1989: the authorities mobilized a force of eight thousand men, including police, soldiers, and Stasi; hospitals were told to prepare beds for possible victims. And she looks at the diplomatic models that were mooted but not executed in the shaping of a new European order in 1990, including that of a pan-European security system built around the continued existence of two separate German states.

Every writer has a professional, geographical, or disciplinary bent. Journalists, politicians, diplomats, historians, political scientists, transitologists, scholars of social movements, economists, experts in security studies, civil resistance, and international relations—all come to 1989 with their own particular experiences, methods, comparative frames of reference, and jargon. Often, they end up saying much the same thing in different ways.

Success has many fathers, and everyone has a favorite. Poles and Catholics like to highlight the role of the Polish pope, particularly in his inspiring visits to Poland in 1979, 1983, and 1987. Germans and Hungarians single out the contribution of Hungarian reform communists who opened the Iron Curtain and let East Germans escape through it. (Michael Meyer, in a book full of vivid personal recollections of events he witnessed as a Newsweek correspondent, calls this the "untold story" of 1989; well, in English perhaps, but in German it has been often told.) Russianists usually give the largest credit to Gorbachev. Germans on the left make the pitch for their version of détente, known as Ostpolitik ; Americans on the right make it for Ronald Reagan. (Romesh Ratnesar subtitles his dispensable book on Reagan's 1987 "tear down this wall" speech in Berlin "A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War.")

There is nothing wrong with such a plurality of perspectives. Each illuminates a different part of the elephant, or views the whole beast from a different angle. But whenever an author seizes on a single element and says this is the explanation, the key, you know he is wrong.

Regrettably, Stephen Kotkin, a celebrated historian of the Soviet Union, falls into this trap when he turns his attention to countries he knows less well.^[2] Uncivil Society contains a lot of meaty, interesting historical explanation of communism's failure, but it is spoiled by a stridently revisionist argument that 1989 was, as the book's subtitle suggests, little more than an "implosion of the communist establishment." This establishment of the party-state, or "uncivil society" (by contrast with what he identifies as the imagined or idealized "civil society" celebrated by dissident and Western intellectuals at the time), "brought down its own system." Except in Poland, "the focus on the opposition falls into the realm of fiction."

His polemic peaks in this line: "The GDR [East Germany] was a Ponzi scheme that fell in a bank run." Now this statement might do as a provocation in the classroom; as a serious assertion in a book it is little short of ludicrous. True, thanks to exhaustive research by historians such as Andre Steiner and Jeffrey Kopstein, we now have a clear understanding of the scale of the GDR's hard currency debt, and the impact this had on the communist leadership in the autumn of 1989. On becoming party leader in succession to Erich Honecker, who had concealed the depth of the problem from most of his colleagues—and in some sense perhaps even from himself—Egon Krenz asked for an honest report on the country's economic position. At the end of October, he was told that the GDR was "dependent to the greatest possible extent on capitalistic credit." But a state is not a bank, let alone a Ponzi scheme. States can live for long periods with large debt burdens. States do not simply "go bankrupt."

And the GDR was a particular kind of state: it was the Soviet Zone of Occupation turned into a satellite of the Soviet Union. So long as that nuclear-armed superpower was prepared to bear the burden of its satellite states, that state could have continued to exist.^[3] But Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers reckoned that their best chance of modernizing the Soviet Union lay in large-scale economic cooperation with the other Germany—the Federal Republic—and other Western partners. Gorbachev felt it was not worth risking that prospect by supporting repression in the GDR. If he, or a different Soviet leader, had made a different call, the GDR could have survived for many years—as a miserable, debt-ridden, crisis-torn country on the front line of a miserable, crisis-torn empire, to be sure, but that would not be the first such case in history.

The metaphor of the bank run, to which Kotkin often returns, shows what else is defective in his thesis. In a bank run, a mass of individuals, acting in panic, in a wholly uncoordinated fashion, run to a bank to get their personal deposits back. They have no other purpose. They have no organization. They articulate no vision of a better bank, let alone of a different banking system in an alternative polity. This is apparently what Kotkin wants to argue.^[4] Always excepting the Polish case, he sees in the crowds in the streets in 1989 only "social mobilization absent corresponding societal organization."

And so, referring to the rapid development of Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution" through mass demonstrations to a nationwide general strike, he writes, "None of this was inspired or led by dissidents or Civic Forum, which was abolished not long after 1989." So the general strike somehow called itself. When 300,000 people on Wenceslas Square chanted " Havel na hrad! "—"Havel to the Castle!"—this did not mean that Havel's biography, personality, or highly visible leadership had anything whatever to do with it. For this was just another "implosion" of a communist establishment. To anyone who was there, or who simply reads the careful accounts by Czech and Western historians who have studied the Velvet Revolution in detail, this claim is as untenable as the one about the Ponzi scheme. This is revisionism on stilts.

The point about such moments of popular mobilization and civil resistance is that, given certain preexisting conditions (including what may be tiny opposition groups and isolated political prisoners like Havel or Aung San Suu Kyi), forms of societal organization such as Civic Forum—improvised, often chaotic, but nonetheless definitely organization—can emerge with extraordinary speed. This is a phenomenon that historians of 1989 should study more deeply, not deny. To claim that popular and opposition agency in East-Central Europe had nothing to do with the outcome is as absurd as it would be to claim that "the people" alone toppled communism and a nuclear-armed empire. As with all historical processes, agency and structure must be understood in a complex interplay.

2.

In truth, the essence of 1989 lies in the multiple interactions not merely of a single society and party-state, but of many societies and states, in a series of interconnected three-dimensional chess games. While the French Revolution of 1789 always had foreign dimensions and repercussions, and became an international event with the revolutionary wars, it originated as a domestic development in one large country. The European revolution of 1989 was, from the outset, an international event—and by international I mean not just the diplomatic relations between states but also the interactions of both states and societies across borders. So the lines of causation include the influence of individual states on their own societies, societies on their own states, states on other states, societies on other societies, states on other societies (for example, Gorbachev's direct impact on East-Central Europeans), and societies on other states (for example, the knock-on effect on the Soviet Union of popular protest in East-Central Europe). These portmanteau notions of state and society have themselves to be disaggregated into groups, factions, and individuals, including unique actors such as Pope John Paul II.

The end of communism in Europe brought the most paradoxical realization of a communist dream. Poland in 1980–1981 saw a workers' revolution—but it was against a so-called workers' state. Communists dreamed of proletarian internationalism spreading revolution from country to country; in 1989–1991, revolution did finally spread from country to country, with the effect of dismantling communism. Yet the story is as much one of unintended consequences as it is of deliberate actions—let alone of historical necessity.

So what happened in 1989 can only be understood on the basis of a scrupulous, detailed chronological reconstruction of intended and unintended effects, in multiple directions on multiple stages, day by day, and sometimes—as on the evening of November 9 in Berlin—minute by minute. The reporting or misreporting of events, especially by television, is itself a vital part of the causal chain. When a trusted, avuncular presenter on the 10:30 PM West German television news declared that "the gates in the Wall are wide open" they were not yet wide open; but this report helped to make them so, since it increased the flood of East Berliners (who watched and were more inclined to believe West German television) hoping to get through the frontier crossings to the West, and the crowds of West Berliners coming to greet them on the other side.^[5] An erroneous report on Radio Free Europe that a student called Martin Šmid had been killed, in the suppression of the November 17, 1989, student demonstration in Prague, helped to swell the protesting crowds in the first days of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. (In what seems to me the best, and certainly the most amusing, of the retrospective chronicles, György Dalos tells how the student came home the next evening to be told by a somewhat agitated father that he was reportedly dead.)

A model of the kind of fine-grained, multinational analysis that we need is the work of the Harvard scholar Mark Kramer on Soviet–East European relations, so far published only in a series of scholarly articles, research papers, and book chapters.^[6] Basing his work on extensive digging in Soviet and East European archives, plus a wide range of published sources, Kramer demonstrates the full intricacy of the interaction between imperial center and periphery. He concludes that what he calls the "spillover" was mainly from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe between 1986 and 1988, in both directions in 1989, and then mainly back from Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union in 1990–1991, as the Baltic states, Ukraine, and eventually Russia itself were emboldened to follow the East-Central European example of self-liberation. If leading academic publishers are not already pursuing Kramer to turn this work into a book, they should start doing so now.

Important though it is, the Soviet–East European interaction is only part of a wider international setting. During the first half of 1989, the new US administration of George H.W. Bush was extremely reticent in its response both to Gorbachev and to the changes being pushed forward by a combination of reform communists and dissidents in Poland and Hungary. What we have learned from the Soviet and East European archives confirms that Washington's assessment was, in fact, far too skeptical. (In one of several excellent scholarly essays in the volume edited by Jeffrey Engel, Melvyn P. Leffler notes how then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney suggested that Gorbachev's policies "may be a temporary aberration in the behavior of our foremost adversary.") Nor did Bush set much store by bearded dissidents who looked like something out of Berkeley in the 1960s. Victor Sebestyen, in a book full of sharp snapshots and crisp narrative, has a well-sourced account of the President meeting with the leading Hungarian dissident János Kis in Budapest in July 1989, and subsequently telling aides, "These really aren't the right guys to be running the place." Much better to stick with a preppy reform communist.

Yet even though Washington's cautious attitude partly resulted from a misassessment, this was actually the best possible position it could have taken. This time around, unlike in 1956, no one in Moscow could suggest with even a jot of plausibility that the United States was stirring the cauldron in Eastern Europe. On the contrary, Bush personally urged General Wojciech Jaruzelski to run for Polish president, as a guarantor of stability, and he was obsessed with doing nothing that could derail Gorbachev. Sarotte suggests that American restraint made it easier for the Soviet Union, too, to step back and let events unfold on the ground in East-Central Europe. With some exaggeration, one might say that Washington got it right because it got it wrong.

To give credit where it is due: in the last months of 1989, especially after the fall of the Wall, and throughout 1990, this initial superabundance of caution turned into a combination of entirely deliberate restraint ("don't dance on the Wall!" was the injunction heard in the corridors of the White House and the State Department) and some quite impressive statecraft in support of Helmut Kohl's drive for German unification on Western terms. But for the decisive nine months, from the beginning of Poland's roundtable talks in February to the fall of the Wall in November, the United States' contribution lay mainly in what it did not do.

That is even more true of the other superpower. Kramer argues that at several moments Gorbachev did quietly nudge East European communist leaders in the direction of bolder change. But for the most part, his crucial contribution was to accept changes happening at the periphery of the Soviet Union's outer empire, rather than attempting to slow down or reverse them.

When Helmut Kohl asked him what he thought of the Hungarians' decision to open the Iron Curtain to Austria, he replied, "The Hungarians are a good people."^[7] Another telling example comes from Poland in August 1989, at a moment when the Solidarity adviser Tadeusz Mazowiecki was trying to form a government led and shaped by non-communists. The last leader of Poland's communist party, Mieczysław Rakowski, records in his diary a telephone conversation with Gorbachev: "When I [Rakowski] said that one could not alter the situation with the help of a state of emergency, G. said that a new variant of martial law [ stan wojenny , the Polish term for the martial law imposed by General Jaruzelski in December 1981] is impossible and, however wearisome it would be, we would have to get out of this situation without resorting to such means."^[8] And the day after the unplanned, spontaneous popular breaching of the Berlin Wall, the last leader of East Germany's communist party, Egon Krenz, received a message from Gorbachev, via the Soviet ambassador to East Berlin. As Krenz recalls it, the Soviet leader congratulated him on a "courageous step." He was, as the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed, an example of a new kind of hero: the hero of retreat.

Yet Gorbachev's laid-back attitude was based on a much deeper misapprehension than Bush's. He mistakenly believed such changes would stop at the frontier of the Soviet Union, which he saw as a country, not an internal empire. Instead, as Kramer shows, the revolutionary changes in East-Central Europe contributed directly to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. Robert Conquest, the historian of the Soviet Great Terror and Ukrainian famine, asked Gorbachev many years later whether, if he had known where it would all lead, he would have done the same again. He replied: "Probably not."^[9]

It is perhaps a characteristic of superpowers that they think they make history. Big events must surely be made by big powers. Yet in the nine months that gave birth to a new world, from February to November 1989, the United States and the Soviet Union were largely passive midwives. They made history by what they did not do. And both giants stood back partly because they underestimated the significance of things being done by little people in little countries.

China also plays an important part. The Tiananmen Square massacre occurred on the very day of Poland's breakthrough in a semifree election, June 4, 1989. I will never forget seeing on a television screen in the makeshift offices of the Polish opposition daily Gazeta Wyborcza , amid the excitement of Poland's election day, the first footage of dead or wounded Chinese protesters being carried off Tiananmen Square. "Tiananmen" happened in Europe, too, in the sense that both opposition and reform communist leaders saw what could happen if it came to a violent confrontation, and redoubled their efforts to avoid it.

To put it another way, the fact that Tiananmen happened in China is one of the reasons it did not happen in Europe.^[10] However, an influence then flowed back in the other direction: from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to China. As David Shambaugh and others have documented, the Chinese Communist Party systematically studied the lessons of the collapse of communism in Europe, to make sure it did not happen to them.^[11] Today's China is a result of that learning process.

The year 1989 was one of the best in European history. Indeed, I am hard pushed to think of a better one. It was also a year in which the world looked to Europe—specifically to Central Europe, and, at the pivotal moment, to Berlin. World history—using the term in a quasi-Hegelian sense—was made in the heart of the old continent, just down the road from Hegel's old university, now called the Humboldt University. Twenty years later, I am tempted to speculate (while continuing to work with other Europeans in an endeavor to prove this hunch wrong) that this may also have been the last occasion—at least for a very long time—when world history was made in Europe. Today, world history is being made elsewhere. There is now a Café Weltgeist at the Humboldt University, but the Weltgeist itself has moved on. Of Europe's long, starring role on the world stage, future generations may yet say: nothing became her like the leaving of it.

In any case, the longer-term consequences of 1989 are only now beginning to emerge. They, too, belong in the synthetic global history of 1989 that, partly for this reason, could not have been written sooner. But after two decades, the time has come for a brilliant young historian—at home in many languages; capable of empathizing both with powerholders and with so-called ordinary people; a writer of distinction; tenured, but with few teaching obligations; well-funded for extensive research on several continents; Stakhanovite in work habits; monastic in private life—to start writing this necessary, almost impossible masterpiece: a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk of modern history. With luck, he or she should have it ready for the thirtieth anniversary, in 2019.

—This is the first of two articles. A sequel will look at the post-1989 history and prospects of "velvet revolution."

Notes

^[1]See a seminal article by Baruch Fischhoff, "Hindsight≠ Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgement Under Uncertainty," in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1975).

^[2]The title page says "Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross," and the preface says the book originated in a Princeton seminar co-taught by the authors, but nowhere specifies the exact nature of Gross's "contribution." Since Gross is an outstanding historian of modern Poland, I am assuming that this contribution came particularly in the chapter on Poland, which suffers least from the weakness I identify below.

^[3]Difficult, of course, if most of East Germany's people had escaped to the West via Hungary; but this counter-factual obviously involves Moscow instructing other satellite states, including Hungary, to keep the Iron Curtain closed for citizens of the GDR, as they had for decades before.

^[4]In an endnote, Kotkin says that "the priceless 'bank run' metaphor was elaborated for the Soviet case by Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Communist Institutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)." But Solnick uses it to describe the behavior of officials stealing from the state. "Unlike a bank run," Solnick writes, "the defecting officials were not depositors claiming their rightful assets, but employees of the state appropriating state assets." While there were elements of this "privatisation of the nomenklatura" during the transition in East-Central Europe, such behavior does not begin to explain what happened in East Germany or Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1989. Illuminating in Solnick's ­analysis of the Soviet Union, the metaphor is simply misapplied to East-Central Europe.

^[5]An appropriately detailed account is Hans-Hermann Hertle, Der Fall der Mauer: die unbeabsichtigte Selbtsauflösung des SED-Staates (Second edition, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999). The same author's documentary television program When the Wall Came Tumbing Down: 50 Hours That Changed the World (English edition: Icestorm International, 1999) is well worth watching.

^[6]The most important set of articles is his "The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union," published in three parts in the Journal of Cold War History, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2003); Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 2004); Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter 2007). But see also his research reports published by the Cold War International History Project, and his chapter in Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present; edited by Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash. (Oxford University Press, 2009).

^[7]Hoover Institution Archives—Hoover Institution-Gorbachev Foundation Collection, Adamishin, Box 1, p. 26. I owe this reference to an as yet unpublished paper by my Stanford colleague Norman Naimark on "The Superpowers and 1989 in Eastern Europe," and my analysis of the role of the superpowers has been enriched by conversations with him.

^[8]Rakowski diary, August 22, 1989, Hoover Institution Archives, consulted by courtesy of the curator of East European Collections, Maciej Siekierski. My translation. (Note that the Rakowski papers are not yet fully catalogued and available for general use.)

^[9]Personal information from Robert Conquest.

^[10]There was substantial bloodshed in Romania—but unlike Tiananmen, it did not result in the existing communist party and leadership remaining in power.

^[11]See David Shambaugh, China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (Woodrow Wilson Center Press/University of California Press, 2008).