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History As It Happens
DOGE and the Books (Bonus Episode)
00:27:26
On April Fool's Day, members of Elon Musk's government dismantling team known as DOGE showed up at the downtown Washington offices of the Wilson Center for International Scholars with grave news. It was not an April Fool's Day prank; they were there...
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- [00:01]
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- [00:28]
Martin
This is a bonus episode of History as It happens. It's June 29, 2025. In the Journal Liberties, historian Michael Kimmage writes, I began a new job at the Wilson center for international scholars on January 13. The executive order mandating a reduction of the Wilson center to its statutory minimum was issued on the evening of March 21, and on April 3, almost all Wilson center employees were fired. They were terminated in the morning, meaning that people would be on administrative leave by 5pm on that day. Out of the office and off their work email A quiet pandemonium followed the announcement of this news. There were office plants still to be saved, though people had started moving out before, they knew the worst and papers had to be packed up and Anqon regime emails still to be sent before the revolution could fully instantiate itself. The center's six floors had always been a hive of activity. The they were never more turbulent than on that day in April. At the same time, all the noise and activity were quickly evolving into silence and stasis. The Wilson center had proudly identified itself as a center for scholars, and scholars must have a library. Of the center's six floors, one was its library, some 30,000 books and dozens of journal collections. And that is Michael Kimmage writing in Liberties. You know Professor Kimmage as a frequent guest on this podcast, and he'll join us again in an exclusive interview about the demise of the Wilson center and its Kennan Institute, which he briefly directed. In the maelstrom of destruction wrought by Elon Musk's so called Department of Government Efficiency. Few noticed what happened to the Wilson Center. There were bigger headlines to read, say about what Musk did to US Aid. So the downfall of the Wilson center maybe wasn't so newsworthy now. The New York Times did run a story on April 2 about Doge and the Wilson Center. It made no mention of the Kennan Institute. A day after employees from Elon Musk's government overhauling team arrived at the group's Washington headquarters to dismantle it, says the article now. I'd bet most Americans were unaware the Kennan Institute existed or that it had a library of 30,000 books that suddenly needed to find a new home. But plenty of people know the name George Kennan and his historical importance. And I would hope most people understand why historical scholarship is so important, why our country needs places like the Wilson center and Kennan Institute to help make sense of this world. Obviously, Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency did not see it this way. Today, Musk is gone from the Trump administration. So is the Kennan Institute. For now, the books, they've been saved, the knowledge and wisdom they contain cannot be easily erased. Michael Kimmage is an expert on US Russia relations and the Cold War, a historian at Catholic University, and as mentioned, the former director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. Our conversation next History is defined by.
- [03:35]
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- [04:03]
Martin
Michael Kimmge, welcome back.
- [04:06]
Michael Kimmage
Wonderful to be back with you, Martin.
- [04:08]
Martin
Remind our listeners a little bit about your background. You've been a historian for a long time. You work for the State Department, taught at Catholic University before you landed this great position that was unfortunately short lived.
- [04:18]
Michael Kimmage
Yeah, I was at the State Department from 2014 to 2016 working in Russia, Ukraine, and prior to that and after that a historian of the Cold War at Catholic University and then also a pretty avid think tanker, you know, mostly in the Russia, Ukraine space. And that's, of course, what the Cannon Institute, founded 51 years ago, was created to contribute to. And this is an institute, as I'm sure we'll discuss shortly, that has an illustrious history, a sort of direct connection to the figure of George Kennan, who's of course, the preeminent strategic thinker concerning the Soviet Union, architect of the Cold War containment policy, and the sort of informal patron saint of the Russia watchers and Russia experts of the present day.
- [04:59]
Martin
This was a career move that made so much sense for you. Right. You had kind of been building toward this and the importance too, of understanding the end of the Cold War, the prevailing interpretations. We need that kind of knowledge right now, don't we?
- [05:12]
Michael Kimmage
Well, we always have. And you know, in the 19th century, the US had a very informal way of dealing with the outside world, a very Small State Department, nothing of a foreign policy establishment to speak of. And then in the 20th century you have, especially after the Second World War, just a huge investment in expertise and a whole range of institutions, including the Wilson center, of which the Kennan Institute was a part, that were meant to gather knowledge, information, ideas about the outside world, translate them into terms that would be clear and understandable for American policymakers, and in that sense, ideally become a constructive part of the policy formation process. So precisely that's a worthwhile venture in my view, one that has very, very deep roots in Washington D.C. going back well past the Cold War. And at the beginning of January 2025, you could say that those institutions in that world was still very much intact.
- [06:08]
Martin
I've been reading about this recently, how U.S. foreign policy, even during World War II and Franklin Roosevelt had been done on an informal basis. Woodrow Wilson handing off a lot of responsibility to Edward House, FDR, I mentioned. And then of course after World War II, with the establishment of the national Security State foundations or think tanks in the following decades of professionals who produce knowledge so policymakers can make better decisions. So on a day to day basis, though, for those, myself included, who have never worked at a think tank, what goes on in a place like this on a day to day basis?
- [06:45]
Michael Kimmage
Well, it can be a little bit difficult to say because the work itself is a little bit hard to describe. It's not as scholarly as a university would be. So, so it's not definitely pure research. And at the same time it's not 100% operational in the sense that it's not all just meetings and presentations. It's some space in between those two pursuits. And so there are various long term projects, quite a lot of consultation with government officials. There's a bit of reading and writing that also goes on simultaneously. And so a given day could skew in one of those directions or the other. But for the Wilson center in particular, it was very important to go to Capitol Hill and to engage with staffers and perhaps with members of Congress and just in conversation. That could be briefings or more public events or that kind of thing. So the, the format's often shifted and changed, but it was at its essence a process of knowledge gathering, if not always through research, then just through conversation and then the communication of that in different formats and fora, at times to the public and at times more to the policy community.
- [07:47]
Martin
Next we know that members of Congress are not experts on, on these matters. Some know more than others. Ted Cruz, the Senator from Texas, just gave an interview to Tucker Carlson and Cruz didn't know anything about Iran. Not to digress about that. April Fool's Day, April 1, 2025 Employees from Elon Musk's government overhauling team, I'm reading from the New York Times here, arrived at the Wilson Center's headquarters to dismantle it. Tell us what happened.
- [08:18]
Michael Kimmage
Well, I don't really know what happened in the inner sanctum of decision making and of how this was transmitted to the Wilson center, but in the course of that week, I think the Wilson center was roughly 150 people. Most of those people, including myself, were fired pretty unceremoniously, I think it would have been. If April 1st was a Monday, it would have been on the Thursday of that week. So fired at 10 in the morning and then given until 5pm to leave the building and to lose email access. So a very rapid process. And then after that point, there was the kind of skeleton crew at the Wilson center to work on the radical transformation of the institution. It's part of the plan that the Wilson center will still exist, but very much in a truncated format. That was the story of that particular week. Now, since you're interested in history, Martin, I think it will be interesting to anticipate the kinds of books that eventually will be written, probably not about the Wilson center alone, but about this moment, I guess, February through March, April of 2025. And it is still very opaque to me what the motivations of the decision makers were in this case, or in fact, it's opaque to me who the decision makers themselves were. One would imagine that the President would have a chance to weigh in on a decision like this, but I'm not certain of that. It's quite difficult to say why this decision was made to close the Wilson center and other such institutions, or if not quite to close, then to really reduce. And it's not even easy to say who the people were who were making these decisions. And so the historian in me is quite eager to find out some answers to these questions. It's difficult, really, to discuss the overall situation without knowing the motivation of the key actors.
- [09:52]
Martin
You did not personally run into any of the Doge people, right? They didn't come into your office and say, professor Kimid, you're out of here. You know, that wasn't. It was done by email, right?
- [10:02]
Michael Kimmage
I'm not quite sure. Yeah. I mean, but it was not a cinematic episode, as it seems the episode at the US Institute of Peace was.
- [10:08]
Martin
And the line item on the federal budget for the Wilson center was small. I mean, we're not talking about saving real money here, making the government more efficient. You're on administrative leave. You're still being paid not to work. So you wrote this marvelous essay in Liberty's Journal. You were magnanimous. You showed grace to the people who fired you. I'd probably be pretty angry. Maybe you were for a day or two. But you wrote this marvelous essay in Liberties, and you wrote here because this is really what I want to talk about. The books, the papers, the legacy, the info, the stuff we need as a society to remember and record the past. He wrote, Those who organized the murder of the Wilson center did not hate the book books. You're going to tell us, too, how many books there were. But I'll continue on here with your essay. You say they had no desire to dump them out onto the plaza outside the building and to burn them. Hatred was not the motivation, nor was it ideological zeal, despite the analogies that were made to China's Cultural Revolution and to its disdain for the educated and for the paraphernalia of history and refinement. The motivation of these vandals, you wrote, was indifference.
- [11:14]
Michael Kimmage
I guess I am filling in some of the blanks here when it comes to the motivations of the Department of Government Efficiency. And I'm happy to say that this is just a subjective reading of things. Again, I want to have more knowledge about who they were and what was on their minds in terms of this decision before one can really say that it's not ideological. But this is how I experienced it. It just struck me as a kind of radical lack of concern. So the decision was made very quickly.
- [11:42]
Martin
And you had this huge library there. So what are you going to do with all these books? Right. That's, I think, what you meant by indifference.
- [11:47]
Michael Kimmage
This takes us to the library. Of course, the treatment of the employees of the Wilson center is as important, if not more important, than the books. And to fire people, you know, in my case, I had only been there for a few months, but in some cases you have people who had worked at the Wilson center for 30 years, very distinguished careers there, and all kinds of achievements and accomplishments and commitments to the institution. You know, to be fired in that kind of rapid way when they had done nothing wrong. There was no accusation of wrongdoing on the part of these employees. That, to me bespeaks, I guess you could say, at best, a kind of radical indifference. But that was palpable there. And then, exactly as you're pointing to, Martin, the Wilson center possessed a library of about 30,000 books. And this is a library that has been built up over decades by different, you know, donors and program directors and scholars contributing and others. And because the librarians were fired with everybody else, on that particular day, day, that first week of April, there was nobody, formally speaking, who was able to attend to these books. And so you have a huge collection in the center of Washington, D.C. with, you know, valuable books and just good books there, and there was nobody appointed to take care of them. And there was no plan put forward by Doge to deal with these, you know, with these treasures. I don't think, you know, as I say in the article, I don't think that they wanted to get rid of the books. I don't think they wanted to throw them out the window. I don't think they. That the books were offensive to them. I think that they truly did not care one way or another whether somebody saved the books or whether the books were tossed on the garbage heap or experienced some other kind of destiny. Let me put it in the most neutral terms possible, because, yes, you said outrage is not my preferred mode of response, but that's a very interesting way of dealing with the nation's assets and with the nation's treasures. And one of the reasons that I wanted to write this piece was as something of a warning to people who are working elsewhere in Washington. You know, unusual things are happening, and we might take certain aspects of our current situation for granted. You know, that a major research center in Washington is not just going to shut down its library overnight or have its library forcibly shut down. And yet that kind of thing is happening. So I wanted my readers just to be aware. Indifference might sound like a small motivation, but it's actually a very, very powerful one. When you don't care, you're capable of a lot of things, and that's a part of this story, too.
- [14:06]
Martin
Where are Kennan's papers now? Are they safe?
- [14:08]
Michael Kimmage
Well, Kennan's papers, just to be clear, are divided between the New York Public Library and Princeton University. So we at the Cannon Institute do not have George Kennan's papers or anything like that. We don't really have, apart from our own institutional archive. We don't really have an archive that we harbor, but we did have, and still do, In a sense, 13,000 books, partially a collection of George Kennan. So 600 books that were from his personal library.
- [14:35]
Martin
Wow.
- [14:35]
Michael Kimmage
Also precious books that he and others helped to gather. 19th century books of Russian literature, travelogues, other things. The great Soviet encyclopedia, which, for students of the Soviet Union, is a kind of cult publication. Journals, periodicals, you know, sort of nicely preserved in the Wilson Center. You know, I'm happy to say all of that stuff is in safety at this point, but there was a period of precarity for all this material. And much as we tried hard to do a good job with the rescue of these books, you know, there was not adequate time and preparation really to handle them. So that too is a function of the indifference of the decision makers who took things in the direction that they did.
- [15:14]
Martin
And to your point about the indifference, I mean, does Donald Trump really know anything about George Kennan? Does he care about the Wilson Center? Probably not. Does Elon Musk value the knowledge of George Kennan and what the Wilson center has been doing for all these decades? Obviously not, insofar he was even aware of what you were doing in there. And these Doge guys who showed up to the institution on April 1, you know, the whole stereotype about the Tech Bros. And all, I'm just guessing, but they probably didn't really value what you're doing there very much either, or not even really vaguely aware. Oh, you got a bunch of books here.
- [15:48]
Michael Kimmage
Oh, well, yes. No, I think that that's correct. Because to look at it bureaucratically, there were two alternatives to what was done. And one would have been to change the Wilson center to say that the priorities were not the priorities of the Trump administration, if that's what the Trump administration would have decided. And that going forward, the Wilson center would just have a different cast and character, which for an institution that's within the government, I think that's a legitimate thing for the White House to say. And so there should be more work on tariffs or more work on Iran policy or more work on Russia policy. You could imagine a different direction. And that was never discussed. And the other option, that wasn't allowed, I think that this is something that the Wilson center would have done by its own volition had it been allowed to. That's that the Wilson center was 70% privately funded. And so what it could have done, if the argument is that the 30%, which I believe is around a $13 million annual appropriation from Congress, if that 13 million was too much, if it was a problem for the US Budget, that could have been eliminated and the Wilson center could have been made into a private entity, but it would have taken time to do that, and it could have survived and perhaps even flourished as a private entity. And yet there was the kind of will to destroy, which is an interesting thing to consider, not to Reform, you know, not to spin off from government, but really to. To destroy. And that demands an explanation which.
- [17:10]
Martin
Which I currently don't have something else here, and maybe, maybe I'm taking this too far. But, you know, when it comes to the importance of knowledge and expertise and a thoughtful. Well, we're talking about Russia here. That was George Kennan's specialty, right? The Trump administration's approach to trying to end the war, I mean, it betrays an ignorance about the world and an approach to diplomacy that is emblematic, I guess, of the way they treated the Wilson Center. The President himself, relying on his own personal charisma or his relationships with Zelensky and Putin, thinking that he'd be able to convince him just to stop the war, as he put it, in 24 hours, before I even arrive at the.
- [17:50]
Michael Kimmage
Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled.
- [17:56]
Martin
It will be settled quickly. I will get the problem solved, and.
- [18:04]
Michael Kimmage
I will get it solved in rapid order.
- [18:07]
Martin
And it will take me no longer than one day. I know exactly what to say to each of them.
- [18:11]
Michael Kimmage
I got along with very well with them.
- [18:13]
Martin
I rarely hear any Trump administration official publicly speak intelligently about what is happening in Russia and Eastern Europe and in Ukraine. Now, I'm not in the private meetings in the State Department, in the Defense Department, in the White House, and I can't say I know all the players who are crafting policy here, trying to bring the war to an end. But for instance, the envoy, Steve Witkoff, he gave an interview where he wasn't able to identify or remember the names of the very Ukrainian territories that he would presumably be negotiating over to try to end the war, the ones where Russia has been illegally occupying. So you get my point here. It just doesn't seem like knowledge is all that important to the most important people in our government, at least the way they act and talk publicly.
- [18:58]
Michael Kimmage
Yeah, I mean, I think there's something certainly to what you say. The President's style is very much a shoot from the hip style, as you mentioned, very much based on personal relationships. You know, you have the firing of a fairly big number of people from the National Security Council. You have a Secretary of State who's currently serving as National Security Advisor. And so there's an elimination. This is a much more important story than the demise of the Wilson center, but there's an elimination of staff at the National Security Council and a lot of unfilled ambassadorial positions and other positions across the government. You have a concentration of decision making power to an unusual degree. In the hands of the president when it comes to foreign policy, I wouldn't want to paint with too broad of a brush. It's not that everybody in the government at the highest levels is lacking in knowledge on the regions that they work with or on the issues that they're dealing with. There are any number of knowledge and certainly very capable people in the higher levels of government. But there is a causal line. I would agree to what you're describing, Martin. And again, speaking very neutrally about this stuff, in a way, you could ask what is the function of a Wilson center for a White House, at least, that doesn't want to engage in long conversations, process consultation with experts, et cetera. If that's not the style, if that's not how things are going to be done, it's legitimate, perhaps, to ask really big questions about why you need a place like the Wilson Center. Although one should note in the case of the Wilson Wilson center that its remit was really to work with Congress and it was a congressionally funded center. That was what the Wilson center was doing up until the very end. Lots and lots of engagement with people on Capitol Hill and lots of support and encouragement from Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, but they were not the ones who made the decision to reduce the Wilson Center. So that's, I guess, a bit of a footnote to what we're describing. But, you know, presidential administrations often change and there can be different chapters, and I wouldn't be that surprised, especially after the sort of Iran back and forth of the last couple of days, if there might not be a somewhat different style in the Trump White House in the next year or two, and maybe a bit more interest in what experts have to say and a bit more interest in process simply to achieve better results. Maybe that's utopian thinking on my part, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if that would happen. But the first four or five months, especially of the Trump second term, revolve to an unbelievable degree around the figure of Trump, his personality, his statements, his social media statements. Even if you compare it to the first Trump term, it's a remarkably novel period. This whole infrastructure that, as we've been talking about, was established World War II, Cold War. This whole infrastructure is definitely not there or built or designed or intended for a president of the kind that President Trump has been in his second term.
- [21:39]
Martin
I see no operating principle except the one to destroy, to tear things down. We'll wrap up with this. Michael Kimmage, your point there about, you know, needing to do the, the hard work of diplomacy and how knowledge plays a big part in that. At the same time, you're saying in this great essay you wrote, beautifully written, do not cry for me, Argentina. You say the Wilson Center's books are not metaphors. They do not symbolize the nation's decline, just as they don't symbolize the nation's health. When the Wilson center was intact, the spring of 2025, you write, was not the fall of Rome, a city that has fallen so many times that its fall has been incorporated into its enduring legacy. And Rome is very much still there, still full after its fall. Rome resists the metaphors that are heaped upon it. So does Washington, D.C. i think what you're saying there is, we'll be okay.
- [22:34]
Michael Kimmage
I guess so, yeah. And not to overdo the doom and gloom that's easy enough to feel at the present moment, the books are still there. Maybe our biggest challenge is not protecting them from the Department of Government efficiency, but getting them into the hands of young people who are going to read these books and learn from them. That's a topic for another discussion, Martin, in terms of how to do that. But yes, you know, you inherit in a country a kind of patrimony, a lot of things that come down to us who can't feel that in the city of Washington, right. The buildings, the monuments, the museums, the extraordinary collections. And I don't think that it's correct in a democracy just to sit back speechless and say, well, the crucial thing is what the White House does. That's the story. And everything revolves around that. It's not. The crucial thing is what we do and how we serve as caretakers of these different patrimonies and inheritances. And there you have a city that's full of people. I can say this very much in the case of the Wilson center and Kennan Institute books, full of people who are knowledgeable, willing to help, willing to do things enterprising, you know, very concerned about the perpetuation of these structures and these institutions. And so, yes, let's not fall in love with the apocalyptic or the elegiac or the poetic metaphor of destruction and decline. Let's just be aware of what we have, and let's do a good job of preserving it. I mean, I think to me, that's a story that we need to tell in Washington. It's a story that we need to tell about American democracy. And it's a story, in a way, that we need to tell about ourselves, what matters in the coming years. It's all about what we do. We vastly overemphasize how important the White House is in the scheme of things. And that's why I wanted those words to resonate, sort of take a deep breath and carry on, in a way, the story of every presidency. Martin, you're the historian in this conversation as much as I am at the story of every presidency, maybe going back to Thomas Jefferson, is that they come to the city with these big ideas and this arrogance and this ego and this big set of plans, and the city kind of absorbs them in a certain way, certain point spits them out and goes on with its business. And that will happen, I think, in the second Trump term as well. And so there's just a longer arc to all of this that we need to be aware of. And to me, that gives a certain kind of optimism and even enthusiasm for all that we can accomplish at the present moment.
- [24:46]
Martin
What matters when it comes to every presidential administration, in the view of history, is, well, two things. What they do in the immediate effect of their policies, but also what endures. And sometimes in the heat of the moment, it feels like that what's happening is going to permanently damage or permanently improve the country. And then five, 10, 15 years later, you can barely remember the things that you were so concerned about or so happy about.
- [25:14]
Michael Kimmage
You know, there are things that I think President Trump accomplished in his first term, things that are of value, and many things that I. That I disagree with. And I don't know how the second term is going to turn out in that regard. There's always, with President Trump, a lot of just, you know, sort of buzz and activity, theatrics and crush of events, and it's very difficult to know which of them are going to be of long standing and which are going to be more transient and ephemeral. And so we can take the conversation, Martin, in a way, by conclusion, back to the place where we began or where we got to at the middle point, which is the importance of books. I mean, books over time, especially history books, they separate out the ephemeral events that just didn't add up to all that much from the big transitions and changes. So let's hear it for the books. I mean, they'll help us in a few years from now to sort of figure out what this moment means and what its consequences are. And we'll be grateful when we have those books about Department of Government efficiency, about Elon Musk, about President Trump, and they'll clarify a great deal. So we must save the book so that we can write new ones and read new ones over time, and that is going to be enormously valuable in the future.
- [26:29]
Martin
This has been a bonus episode of History As It Happens. Remember, new episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday. My weekly newsletter comes out on Friday. You can sign up@historyasithappens.com or go to Substack and search for History As It Happens. And you can find us on Facebook now too. As as we report History As It Happens.
- [27:12]
Michael Kimmage
It.