“Looking for the Good War” is a remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words some 350 pages later. It is a stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war, written by an English professor who teaches Homer, Shakespeare and Styron to future officers of the U.S. Army. Elizabeth Samet is a professor of English at West Point. Her classroom high above the Hudson River must be a lively spot.

Samet is a fine writer with a gift for powerful arguments articulated in elegant prose. Her mission is to confront her compatriots with painful truths about our capacity to romanticize the wars in our history, and especially the one often referred to as “the good war” – World War II. She ends her introduction with one of many memorable passages: American “nostalgia for the war years remains a bulwark against doubt and disillusion, a great golden age to which we can always retreat to remember who we were and might be again, seeking safety through violent conflict because once we thought we found it there, retaining a faith in the American capacity for exceptional violence. Victory in the twentieth century’s second global conflict transformed the world and at the same time condemned the United States to a futile quest for another (war) just as good, just as definitive, just as transformational.” Even after half a dozen readings, these two long sentences still resonate.

Review

“Looking for the Good War”

By Elizabeth D. Samet

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 354 pages

$28

Samet argues that in the decades since World War II, American attitudes have changed: A country once described as “the great nation of futurity,” preoccupied with enthusiastic anticipation of its glorious future, has become nostalgic for a comforting past that the culture has oversimplified and mythologized. Samet finds “a particular irony in dwelling so stubbornly in the past.”

She is particularly critical of two popularizing writers of history whose work has made a powerful impression on American culture: Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Ambrose’s volumes on the men who fought World War II, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Willies and Joes in the trenches, were enormously popular and, Samet argues, profoundly misleading.

“Ambrose carefully sculpted his stories, all of which share a worshipful tone and largely ignore contradictions or complexities that prove disruptive to a sentimental account of American decency and goodness. He promulgated a fantasy that American soldiers somehow preserved a boyish innocence amid the slaughter required to save ‘the world from barbarism.’ ” After dismembering Ambrose, she gives readers an intriguing review of the sociological literature on the motivations of soldiers in combat. They fight to survive and to protect their comrades; heroic patriotism is not a common attribute of men at war.

She is equally tough on Brokaw, whose “The Greatest Generation” enshrined the heroic attributes of those who fought the war or supported it on the home front. For a distinguished television journalist with a fine reputation for his reporting skills, Brokaw seemed to let his enthusiasm for his parents’ generation overwhelm his journalist’s skepticism.

Samet faults Brokaw’s historical analysis and is impatient with his cheerleading. He depicts “a country of unparalleled unity and commitment,” she writes, but ignores “the fervor and reach of the nation’s fascist sympathizers” and the many divisions of opinion in the country before and during the war. She accuses him of minimizing the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a national trauma whose effects were felt by virtually every American. It “arguably did more than anything,” including the war, to define the “greatest” generation. She is impatient with Brokaw’s hyperbole, quoting his assertion that “this is the greatest generation any society has produced. I have the facts on my side.” She responds that this sweeping statement “is impossible to prove, the narrative driven less by facts than by emotion.”

Samet spent long hours watching the movies and reading the popular fiction of the 1940s and 1950s in search of clues about underlying American attitudes toward the war and its aftermath. Her purpose is to challenge what she bluntly calls the myths of “the good war.”

One of her favorite sources is Studs Terkel’s wonderful 1984 book of interviews with Americans who lived through World War II both in uniform and at home, ” ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II.” She uses Terkel’s explanation for why he put quotation marks around “the good war” as the epigraph of the prologue of her book: “Quotation marks have been added, not as a matter of caprice or editorial comment, but simply because the adjective ‘good’ mated to the noun ‘war’ is so incongruous.”

Terkel’s classic books, composed of edited transcripts of his many interviews with a rich variety of people, Samet writes, “derive their strength from contradiction and ambiguity,” qualities absent from the works of Ambrose, Brokaw and other romanticizers of World War II. The voices Terkel quotes, all recorded decades after the war ended, “range from the deeply nostalgic to the bitterly disaffected.” There was no consensus among Terkel’s interviewees about a good war.

Samet’s survey of books and movies that she consumed to try to discover a truer sense of the World War II years is intriguing reading. One senses that this was new territory for a writer who was born a generation after the war. She writes about these movies and novels like an anthropologist discovering cultural artifacts. She is struck by the explicit and implicit descriptions of wartime reality that she found in these works, which ranged from lowbrow to high-. Many contained ambiguous and even hostile portraits of home-front attitudes toward soldiers and the war and, after the fighting ended, grim accounts of how veterans’ wartime experiences poisoned their postwar lives. She did not find a “good war” in these books and movies.

She is intrigued by the devices of “film noir” movies, a popular style in the 1940s and 1950s, whose stories often contradicted conventional morality and conveyed the message that “decency doesn’t always win out and that heroes and villains can prove difficult to tell apart because their methods are very much the same.” Were the films that embraced this cynicism just as American as the jingoistic war movies depicting American heroism in Europe and the Pacific?

She also discovered that writers and moviemakers regularly drew parallels between veterans’ wartime experiences and crime and violence in postwar America: “Through the vehicle of the crime story – blackmail, heist, even murder – these works highlight the deep ambivalence, forgotten over time, that once characterized attitudes to the war itself and those who fought it.”

By the end of her book, Samet has made clear her deep frustrations with the recurring American inclination to try another dose of military adventure to cope with difficult international problems. She blames this bad habit on “a misapprehension about the meaning of American violence in the world … (that) leads us repeatedly to imagine that the use of force can accomplish miraculous political ends even when we have the examples of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to tell us otherwise.” That a West Point professor is comfortable making such harsh judgments is a striking sign of our interesting times.

Robert G. Kaiser, a former managing editor of The Washington Post, reported for the paper from Vietnam in 1969-70.