West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

The American Hegelian element actually peaked in 1945–1946. During that year, Hilary Conroy was at first an ensign, then a lieutenant, junior grade, in the Intelligence Department of the U.S. Navy, stationed in Tokyo. His assignment, as one of his superiors put it, was to “make damn sure nobody assassinated General MacArthur” during the occupation of Japan. Young Conroy, not yet a professor, served somewhat as a transmitter of what historian Elizabeth Borgwardt would later call, the internationalization of New Deal justice.² Twenty-six-year-old Lt. Conroy saw himself, a bit self-righteously in hindsight, as bringing the full plate of late Roosevelt-era democracy to the Japanese (even though, as we shall later see, he had a streak of Taft conservatism in him as well). This included the right to free speech, assembly, and press; the right to form unions; the right to a liberal education; democratization of agriculture through land redistribution; the right to have enough to eat; and gender equality. This heady package included it all, even freedom from war and militarism in the “peace Constitution” extended to the Japanese in March 1946. The idea that freedom and democracy could be spread and that the United States at its best might represent the cutting edge of a new kind of world Zeitgeist by doing so, animated his year in Japan, at least initially; in retrospect, he reflected on the truth of this “spreading democracy” narrative.

In fact, one might explain his next sixty years as a historian as one large empirical research project to determine whether the United States indeed represented so uncomplicatedly the good side fighting rather bad enemies, or whether something more complex was going on. The complexities would lead him to suggest realism and active neutrality. Without taking his eye off the real quest for peace and justice in a deeper underlying sense, he would increasingly become more dubious of governments that justified day-to-day matters in idealistic terms—the governments of Wilson, F. D. Roosevelt, G. W. Bush, and comparable Japanese idealists, for example—and more respectful of the work of realistic negotiators of compromise. One of the unmistakable conclusions of his work is that the Johnson/Nixon line in Vietnam and the Bush line in Iraq are more like Japan’s apologia for imperialism in the 1930s and ’40s than like U.S. policies of the same period, a conclusion which startlingly and ominously flips history upside down.