Pulitzer-Prize winning author Rick Atkinson gave remarks and answered questions last night at the Nashville Public Library. Atkinson spoke as part of the ongoing MP&F Speaker Series and promoted his latest nonfiction book, The Day of Battle. The book makes the case for the significance of campaigns in Sicily and Italy in undermining Germany’s power during World War Two. Atkinson discussed the book and current and historical events during the event. A pair of his comments stood out to me as memorable and insightful:

• “World War Two is bottomless. There will always be more to discover.”
• “You can tell a lot about a man by the way he writes to his wife under stress.”

Atkinson discussed the revelation that Gen. George Patton slapped two soldiers within one week in 1943. Forty reporters kept the incidents secret for months out of respect for President Eisenhauer, despite their disdain for Patton. Would that ever happen today?

When asked to compare writing about current events, such as the Iraq war, with writing about decades-old events, Atkinson said, “Everything is right there in front of your face [when covering news as a journalist]. There is very little perspective. What you see, hear, taste and feel becomes part of the historical record.”

Atkinson spent every day for two months alongside Gen. David Petraeus with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. He contrasted the experience of writing in the “inverted pyramid” style of journalism, which emphasizes urgency but lacks the time needed for thoughtful perspective, against writing narratives about “real history” much farther in the past. For example, Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie, which he described as the definitive history of Vietnam, was published 15 years after the war ended. A history of the Iraq war, he argued, will have to wait not only for an end to that conflict but also for sufficient time to pass for historians to consider the events “from a distance.”

Atkinson cited an alarming statistic: Historians have made the case that only 29 years of recorded human history have been entirely free of war. Most of the assembled crowd, he observed, was not alive when any of those years took place. It’s worth making the distinction that several attendees in the room were senior citizens, and judging from their questions to Atkinson, most of them had direct combat experience or plenty of memories of loved ones who served during wartime. If there’s any credibility at all to that sobering figure, that’s a powerful argument for doing more to achieve peace … in the Middle East and everywhere else.