Creating History: Finding Perspective in Times of Crisis

The rest is history.

Every day, someone reminds us we’re living in “historic” times. But history is something that is already made; today will be judged later. So we’ve been thinking: What is, history, exactly, and how do we contextualize ourselves, our challenges and our moments in it?

Luckily, F.O.V. (Friend of Verse) Phillip Zelikow answered our email. Phillip is a true multi-hyphenate: attorney-academic-diplomat-author, in Wikipedia speak. To put a finer point on it, his work has focused on critical episodes in American/world history. He himself made history as the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and one of the few individuals ever to serve on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Boards for presidents of both parties, in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. We could go on volumes, but we’ll let Philip tell you what history—and this moment—means in our daily lives and our collective understanding of the world.

The rest is history: how will we look back to today?

History has value in two important ways, both so obvious that we take them for granted.

First, history is our backstory. When you get acquainted with a person you look for their backstory. Where did someone go to school? How did they find this particular job? How did they meet their spouse? Wanting the backstory also holds true for communities, ideas, issues, institutions, nations—and for the world.

Second, ‘history’ is mainly about human choices—distinguishing it from, say, geology. To learn history is to learn stories about how humans across time and space have confronted challenges and made choices. Some of these stories are well-known and interest us, like all great stories do. What we learn from history is not all that different from what we learn from a great novel, or even a good movie. Take it from Stan McChrystal. When he took over the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in 2004, he sat his commanders down to watch Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers,” a film rich with historical lessons in interrogation methods that applied directly to the questioning of enemy captives in the war against violent Islamist extremism.

People are usually aware when they are living through something ‘historic,’ even if it’s just important in their personal history. But history acquires much of its authority because it is supposed to be true (and therefore also more true-to-life). Getting true history turns out to be hard. Sometimes change is incremental until it accumulates into a ‘pandemic’ moment that everyone notices. It’s safe to say we’re noticing this one, and deeper knowledge of the life of our nation and world can put the crisis in perspective. History can help people see that their challenges may not be completely ‘novel,’ and that experience can greatly enrich the cumulative ‘life’ experience we all rely on every day. Like many life experiences, history can prepare us for crises, challenging us to ask what human qualities we most value in such a time. 

When people think about how much distance you need from an event, I tell them the challenge with perspective is less a problem of time. It’s a matter of gathering the necessary information and figuring out what questions can and should be answered. For instance, perhaps the most mundane question about 9/11: What happened that morning? This was surprisingly difficult to determine, in part because the US Air Force and the FAA hastily prepared accounts and timelines that turned out to be incorrect in important ways. That work could have cleared up some unfortunate misunderstandings, but it was not done correctly until our Commission’s staff did it more than two years later, then obliged the chiefs of those agencies to acknowledge, under oath, that their earlier versions (which they had given to President Bush and to the American people) had been incorrect. We discussed some of this in Chapter One of our report.

In other words, there is real value in doing some work right away, if it can be done well, because—if the event is important—people are understandably anxious to know exactly what happened and will, for better or worse, construct stories to satisfy this curiosity. It’s our duty and challenge to resist poorly constructed stories and try our best to get this moment right. It is our collective memory, our backstory. And it can serve as a gift—a guidepost—when our future selves grapple with future challenges.