Contentious American Historian Annual Meeting

What Historians Against the War Want

The most combative member of the [Historians Against the War] group was Blanche Wiesen Cook, the biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, who noted that at the 1969 meeting Eugene Genovese had said, "We should put them down now and put them down hard and put them down forever." Earlier in the meeting she predicted that the "occupation will be disgusting" and charged that "every bomb that falls on these open cities is a war crime." Later, she observed that "we had an impeachment of a president because he used his cock. Now we should impeach a president for being brainless." She referred to this as "the organ approach to history," which got a long laugh.

Cook, noting that many of the most vociferous antiwar activists are old--Robert Byrd, Schlesinger, Zinn, Lynd--cracked, "You have to be eighty in this country to take a stand." Somebody else then cried out, "Never trust anybody under 80," which drew laughs.