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I see antisemitism as a flashing amber light before the light turns red.
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Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller center of Public affairs at the University of Virginia, dedicated to the proposition, first articulated by Walter Lippmann during World War II, that a strong and balanced foreign policy is the necessary shield of our democratic republic. Elliot I'm Eliot Cohen, professor of Strategic Studies Emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International studies in Washington, D.C. and a contributing writer at the Atlantic. My partner in all things strategy, Eric Edelman, is still on vacation, but I'm delighted that I'll be joined today by a special guest whom I will introduce in a moment. But first, the jackassery of the week, which listeners often tell us is their favorite part of the show, and then, if you'll bear with me, a bit of a soliloquy. The administration's agreement with Iran, which is in reality an unwarranted and unnecessary capitulation masquerading as a deal, is of course, the ultimate jackass. Read this week. Eric and I will be talking about its potential consequences in coming months. I should note now, though, that Vice President Vance is denouncing critics of the agreement as warmongers, which is a bit rich coming from an administration that launched a month long ferocious bombardment of another country, including threatening to obliterate its civilization, all without congressional approval. But consistency in his convictions is not the Vice President's strong suit. The more minor but still potentially lethal jackassery of the week that struck me originated in Secretary of Defense, not Secretary of War Hexseth's decision to make flu vaccines optional for service personnel. Unsurprisingly, this piece of folly has had consequences, as this week we learned that one hundred and sixty Air Force trainees at Lackland Air Force Base came down with the flu. The flu can be lethal, and may even have been so in one case. But more importantly, service personnel give up lots of freedoms. One of them really should be freedom from vaccination against easily spread, disabling and potentially lethal diseases. We're taping this session on Juneteenth, the observed anniversary of the final emancipation of enslaved Americans, which took place in Texas. I won't be here next week because I'll be speaking at a conference run by the Tocqueville foundation, which takes place at the Chateau de Tocqueville, still in the same family of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains a classic and indispensable study of the United States, not just in the period before the civil war, which is when he wrote it down to the present day. And since shield of the Republic usually takes July 4th off, that means that if I want to say something about the holiday, now's the time. So bear with me while I try to bring Alexis to Tocqueville, Juneteenth and July 4th together. Tocqueville came to study the United States because, aristocrat that he was, he feared the democratic era approaching in Europe. By democracy, he referred less to a form of government than to the spread of political equality, mass politics, and the gradual disappearance of certain kinds of freedom. What he feared was that democracy would come at the expense of liberty. In the United States, he believed he found a country that had managed to reconcile both. He saw many sources of that likely success, beginning with our federal system of government, our legal system, our attitudes to religion, and above all, what he called mer not exactly morals so much as habits of thought and behavior. I think it's fair to say that he came away from his travels in this country an optimist about the United States. Juneteenth. The date in 1865, when slaves in Texas were finally freed by union armies represents the closing of one phase and the destruction of the most pernicious institutional inheritance of the colonial period, chattel slavery. It had come at the price of enormous suffering in a colossal war that left on the order of 700,000Americans dead. And even then, the victory was incomplete. Juneteenth came nearly a century after the declaration of independence, whose underlying principles were, as Thomas Jefferson understood, incompatible with the institution upon which his own way of life rested. It took another century for the basics of equality, indifferent to race, to be established in law. And some might argue that even now the work is incomplete. But we've come a long way. I had the great privilege of working for the first black woman to be secretary of state. That would have been inconceivable when I first came into this world. I point all this out because this July 4, the 250th celebration of the declaration of independence, is being observed under a cloud. Disgust with both political parties prevails. We have an appalling president whose megalomania, dishonesty, lawlessness and willfulness make him unfit to govern. He's surrounded and enabled by sycophants comparable only with those who truckled to some of the more unsavory Roman emperors. Congress has for some decades now proven itself irresponsible in such matters as the national debt and feckless in dealing with America's urgent national problems. On both right and left, movements that seek to suppress free speech and not merely defeat, but persecute political opponents have risen. And yet I remain a long term optimist about this country, founded not, as JD Vance believes, on allegiance to blood and soil or to a religious creed, but on the unshakable belief that each of us are created equal, that we each have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that government exists to foster and protect those rights, not to deny them. In equally vehement opposition to those who think that the United States is forever stained by original sin, I would argue that the Declaration of Independence was a profoundly subversive document. As the great historian Gordon Wood, who has just passed away at age 92, repeatedly reminded us, it was the ticking bomb that would blow up slavery, give us the strength to win World War II, hold off communism, and, when our leaders know what they are doing, do immense good in everything from spreading economic opportunity to ending pandemic disease abroad. It is the source of America's appeal to the rest of the world. America's greatest political figure, Abraham Lincoln, declared that he never had a political feeling that did not emanate from the sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence, whether they were overtly conscious of its words or not. It's why my grandparents, like so many millions of others, came to this country in search of freedom and a better life. The United States is always a work in progress, a collection of aspirations partly unfilled or thwarted, perhaps even a massive hypocrisies. But then again, you can only be hypocritical if you have ideals to which you are pledged. In some ways, we are falling short now, but now is not forever. And whatever the trials of the moment, I remain, like Tocqueville and Lincoln, a long term optimist about the United States. I think you should be one too. Well, with that, let me introduce my guest, Deborah Lipstadt. She's the Emory University. She's the Emory University Distinguished Professor. That's a very, very rare academic honor at any institution. I think she's only the fourth one at Emory over its entire history. She's the author of numerous books, among them the Eichmann Trial, Holocaust History on Trial. She was the subject of a movie, Denial. We'll talk a little bit about that. Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory Beyond Belief. The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945 Antisemitism here and now and hopefully before Too Long, a Memoir that will talk about her experiences from 2022 to 2025 as special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism with the rank of Ambassador. Deborah, it's a joy to have you with us. Welcome to Shield of the Republic.
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Thank you. It's a joy to be with you, Elliot. I've already learned a lot and my mind is sort of reeling at your introductory statement. So it's very moving. It's very him. It's. It was a prayer for the Republic.
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So let me. Let me just begin. Deborah, to help introduce you to our audience, how would you characterize yourself as a historian of the Holocaust, A Jewish historian, a historian of anti Semitism? What, just some of you?
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I started out really as a historian of the Holocaust. Actually, I started out, my undergraduate work was in political science and American government, focusing primarily on America. And then in my first job, I was. I was at the University of Washington in Seattle just as Microsoft was beginning, but I didn't know about it, so I didn't get in on the ground floor. And I was teaching a course on the Holocaust. I was asked to teach a course on the Holocaust. This is around the time NBC did its show the NBC holocaust, etc. And there was a lot of discussion about it. And I was giving a lecture on what America could have known, what FDR could have known, what the Congress could have known, and what the public. And I mainly focus on government. And in the middle of the lecture was a large lecture class. And generally the way I operate my classes, I wouldn't be surprised if you do the same, unless it's a seminar. I lecture. And then I always stop and say questions, comments, reactions, as opposed to people standing there waving their hands, et cetera. So in the middle of my statement about what the Congress knew and what the State Department knew and what FDR knew, a student burst out. And this goes back a long way. He said, what could my parents have known today? He would say, what could my grandparents have known? Or my great grandparents have known? And I didn't have a real answer. So I began to look at the press and what was in the press. And I discovered that there was a bureau in the White House, the Press Information Bureau during the Roosevelt administration that cut clips from American newspapers. There were hundreds of American newspapers and stuck them in little envelopes based on topic and date. And this was during the Reagan administration. And I was out of the archives in Suitland, Maryland. They were about to throw them away. I said, I'll take them. No, we're not allowed to Give them to you. They have to be thrown away. So I collected as I went through them, they sort of disposed of them. And that sort of brought me into an intersection of America and America and the Holocaust. And that's where I was pretty much situated for quite a few years until after my book on Beyond Belief, the American Press, and the coming of the Holocaust came out. I was in Israel for a conference in Jerusalem, and two of the great Holocaust historians, Yisrael Gutman and Yehuda Bauer, knew I was there, saw me at the conference and said, come see us up on Mount Scopus in our office at the Hebrew University, happy to spend time with them. And they said to me, what's your next project? I said, well, I'm just finished this one. I don't yet have one on the back burner. They said, we have an idea for you. Holocaust denial. So I said, I laughed in the face of these two great historians. I said, that's like flat earth theory. They say, no, we see it as a source of antisemitism. We see it as a new form of antisemitism. So when two great historians like that ask you to take on something and offer you a fellowship to go with it, I did it and thought that that would be a detour for two or three years, and I'd go back to studying the stuff I had been looking at before. And of course, I wrote my book on Holocaust denial, got sued by the world's then leading Holocaust denier, David Irving, and the rest is history. So I guess I would say today I'm really a historian of antisemitism and a student of antisemit Semitism, both its history and its contemporary manifestations.
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Fascinating. Say a little bit more about the David Irving trial. So the. You know, it's funny, I remember David Irving when he was initially publishing some of his things, people said, well, military
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history, of course you'd remember.
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Yeah, it was military history. And they say, well, he's a little bit strange about the Nazis, but he digs up stuff that other people. And he's got very good German and so on. But then I gradually began to realize, no, no, this guy is very, very bad indeed. And he actually sued you for libel. So the lawsuit, which got turned into a movie, which involved you, other famous historians, Professor Kershaw, among others, Richard Kershaw. How did that all happen?
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Well, so. So when Professors Bauer and Guttman asked me to do this, I wrote this book on denial. It was a hard book to write because I felt like I was giving Gravitas to something that didn't really deserve it. And it also was a hateful. Writing about the Holocaust is hard enough. You have to sort of suspend emotions to do that. But writing about people who deny it and who are essentially saying it didn't happen, but it should have happened because it would have been a wonderful thing, was just revolting. So I finally got it out and in the book I devote 250, 300 words maximum, I really have to count them after all these years to David Irving, who as you rightly point out, was a sort of independent historian, known as someone with impeccable German who managed to find documents and diaries that other people didn't. My assumption is he would go. He, he had very right wing views. He wrote on Dresden, something you know well. And in his writing on Dresden right from the beginning. But if Richard Evans, who was one of the historians at my trial, tracked the different versions of his writing about Dresden, and you can see them if you go to www.hdot.org holocaustdenialuntrial.org it has all the legal, all the legal papers and transcripts, et cetera. It's an Emory site, but it's got its own portal. And he writes about Dresden essentially as a Allied war crime. He starts out with a death toll of 20,000 and by the last version it's 250,000. By the way, if you look at Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five in his front page, his front piece where he acknowledges books that he used, David Irving's residence. So but for him it was, for David Irving it was perfect because you can say, see, the Allies, the Nazis may have done bad things, but the Allies also did bad things. And he was moving in that, you know, they did bad, they did bad, they did bad. They had nothing to compare to the Holocaust. And first he downplayed it and eventually he grew to deny it. So I wrote about him in that way and I didn't think he'd be upset. Not that I worried if he would be upset. Upsetting him was not one of my concerns, but I was surprised. I called him a Holocaust denier. I thought he was proud of it. But he sued me in Britain. And as you well know and others of your listeners may know, British libel law is the mirror image of American libel law. In America, if I say you libeled me, I have to prove you libeled me. In England, the law works under words written or spoken that would be slander are considered untrue until proven true. So the onus, the Burden of proof is on the author or the creator of the words to prove the truth. So some people said, in fact, leading Holocaust historian Raul Holberg, he said, oh, Deborah, just ignore it and do your work. I said, I can't. If I ignore it, he wins by default. And someone said, well, no one will take it seriously. I said, he will be able to go through life saying, deborah libeled me by calling me Deborah. Lipstadt libeled me by calling me a Holocaust denier. Ipso factor, I am not a Holocaust denier. And ipso facto, again, my version of the Holocaust, no gas chambers, no death camps, a death toll maybe of 600,000 by privation and starvation, but not planned murder, are true. So I fought it. I had terrific legal team. Anthony Julius, who was also not only a prominent solicitor in England, but a historian also of antisemitism. And we had this dream team of historians. Richard Evans, then of Cambridge, Robert Jan Van Pelt and Richard Evans.
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I was thinking of not.
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Yes, right. That's right. Christopher Browning. It was a dream team of historians. And what they did. Some people say we had to prove the Holocaust happened, but we didn't do that. This was really Anthony Julius and his partner James Lipson's genius in figuring this out. We proved, actually it was standard operating procedure for libel in England. We proved that what he said was not true. In other words, we weren't proving how many died, but we were proving when he said only 600,000 died, that he didn't have the evidence for it. So we were pulling the ground out by going back to his original footnotes. And it took a lot of work to get back there. But showing that he lied, made up, invented, reversed, misquoted, reverse sequence. And you know how easy it is to change something when you just reverse the sequence of who said what when. And we won a sweeping victory, I think. I don't know if it was the Times of London or the Daily Telegraph who said, history has had its day in court and scored a stunning victory. And others compared it. Nuremberg, Eichmann, Lipstadt v. Irving.
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So, yeah, no, and you wrote a wonderful book about it. And Richard Evans also wrote a. Yeah,
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Richard Evans wrote a great book. Robert. Jan Van Tel wrote a book. Peter Longrich. There are about six. So if you want to worry about the scholarship, I think six or seven books came out of it. So that also gives me a sense of accomplishment.
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It is a major accomplishment.
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Good.
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Good for you for fighting it. Okay, so then let's fast forward. You. You were appointed special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism. My old department, the Department of State. Could you just explain briefly, how did that happen?
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Well, this was a post that first originated under Bush, too, was originally a very small post. Single office, you know, single person in the office, et cetera. It grew somewhat. It took. And Trump won. It took Trump two years to appoint someone. So Ilan Carr, who was there, had a relatively short tenure, but everyone had different foci. And they were all very good people and very helpful to me when I first came in and sort of orienting me what they did do, didn't do, wish they had done. But I was the first person. Two firsts. First of all, the first person told it at the rank of ambassador because the Congress, Frank Lankford from Oklahoma, Republican. And Jackie Rosen from Nevada. Nevada. Nevada, Nevada. I always get the two mixed up. I know one is very wrong. Jointly put through acting in the Senate to raise it to the level of ambassador and on policy issues that I reported directly to the secretary, which, as you know, from someone who worked on the seventh floor adjacent to the secretary, how important that is when you can talk directly, go directly to the secretary. And how important, being a Senate confirmed person, ambassador, you have to go through.
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You have to, you know, and have the ambassadorial rank. I mean, I think it speaks, you
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know, when you walked into a room and they said, this is Ambassador Lipstick, you know, it talks. It listens. The people listen. And of course, then they, many of them, I would come to a meeting of a foreign minister and there'd be an advisor waiting there with my books in his hand, you know, for me to sign or something like that. So I gave the White House great credit for appointing me because as you well know, since you were one of those whom this didn't happen. We know too many smart academics who went into government and crashed and burned because they thought just me. I know. And they didn't understand the difference between academia and diplomacy. Academia, you want to be right. Diplomacy, you want to be effective, which means sometimes compromising in a way I would never compromise. When you're in the ivory tower of the academy. And I came in and I came in. I think there were three people in my team. By the time I left, there were 22 people on the team. We really grew, and I had a very good relationship with Secretary Blinken. And I really was, in most cases, was pushing against open doors in the State Department. And in the beginning, our focus was the first couple of years I came in at one point, in fact. This will resonate with you particularly since your wife was at the Holocaust Museum for so many years. Years towards when the White House was getting very close to announcing or for me to officially say I want to be considered. And they had a short list. But as they told me afterwards, and even during it, I was on the top of the list. I was about to say, no, I don't want to do this because I had spoken to a lot of people in the state who had State Department experience, not you, I should have come to you as well. And they talked about the clearance process that any statement you want to make has. I said someone else in another bureau is going to clear on what I have to say about antisemitism. Who are they? What do they know? You know? And that I couldn't, I couldn't get do an interview unless it was cleared. I couldn't write something and not bed unless it was cleared. How I had to work through different levels, et cetera. And I said, who needs this? I'm a senior professor at a university, a good top ranking university. I teach three courses a year. I have research assistants, writing assistants. I'm not going to do it. I was talking to Sarah Bloomfield, who director of the Holocaust Museum. And I said, sarah, I think I'm taking my name out of consideration. And she said to me, deborah, you must do this. And I thought she was going to say because of the rise of antisemitism and this is 21, 2021. And I said, why? She said, because of the Abraham Accords, you have a chance to do something affirmative. And that really spoke to me because I didn't want it to be a job of just putting out fires. I would have to put out fires. Comes with the territory. You can't ignore that. But I wanted to do something. So my first trip, your viewers can see behind me a black box that has all the pins of the, I think 38 or 40 something country visits I did in my tenure. My first trip was to Saudi Arabia and I went, I landed in Saudi Arabia at the end of June. The Saudis aren't in Saudi Arabia at that time or if they are, they're getting ready to leave. It's. It's hot as hell. And Barbara Leaf, who was, I think under Secretary, I get the titles mixed up for near head of the Near East Bureau, very important task. When she was, when I was briefing her about my trip, she said, Deborah, just tell me one thing. In the State Department you're known as one of the more educated, smarter, whatever appointees. What the heck are you doing in Saudi Arabia in the summer. And I said, barbara, I'm going to make a point, and that we were working on them to bring them into the Abraham Accords. I didn't think I could do it. I wasn't doing it alone. There were lots of people, including our friend in common, Dan Shapiro, and others throughout the State Department working on this. But I wanted to telegraph the message to Saudi Arabia, to the uae, to Bahrain and to other Arab majority countries, not necessary countries, that the fight against antisemitism was at its most basic, not a good look. And Saudi Arabia at this stage with Mohammed Ben Salman, MBS, sort of bringing Saudi Arabia full speed into the 21st century, that this was something that was a not a good look. And it fomented extremism. It wasn't just about Jews, it fomented extremism. And extremism, as you know as well as any of us, is what the the Gulf countries despise and are so fearful of. And that was a message that I took. I had very good response on that. In Saudi Arabia, no motion. I knew we weren't going to walk out with them saying to me, oh, yes, we'll sign on. But you know, the Gulf country, Saudi Arabia in particular, for years and again, you know, this sent out imams.