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All this flow of twenty-first-century questioning and narrative uncovering begins with the premises of the good diplomatic historian, especially when one doesn’t stop at each country’s interests but includes a sense of decency and fairness. Such considerations function quietly behind Conroy’s methodology, connecting what is usually divided: old school and new school ways of doing history.
Good War?
Known, moreover, as a peace historian, Conroy researched the Pacific informed by the following reasoning. Looking at World War II as the good war, including, by extension, the occupations after the war as good occupations, provided the main framework—the main analogy or model—for justifying the U.S. military role abroad ever since. In the official narratives of foreign policy makers, wars such as Vietnam and Iraq have cloaked themselves in good guys–bad guys terms based mainly on the memory of World War II. Conversely, officials avoid the Vietnam War as an analogy for subsequent wars, notably the Iraq War; and also, earlier wars, such as the war for the Philippines in 1898, and even World War I, rarely get called upon as analogies. These wars, not considered suitable for evoking a framework for the United States when it goes to war, do not communicate “Why We Fight,” as the famous Frank Capra 1940s film series put it. In fact, without World War II as a precedent and analogy, it seems possible that the American public might think about war and the military quite differently than they have for decades. After all, notes Conroy, as the Philippine-American War dragged on, the U.S. public startled policy makers into moving away from more overt imperial ventures and toward the open door by giving strong support to the idealistic antiwar candidate William Jennings Bryan in the 1900 election. Moreover, the bittersweet aftertaste of World War I swung the public toward isolationism. And after the Vietnam War, too, came an overall recoiling from war. We might hypothesize, then, that the American self-image as a force for good—the U.S. military conceived as spreading American freedom and democracy—has rested heavily on one war, World War II.