BEGIN AMBROSE INTO B SIDE OF THIRD AUDIOTAPE, STILL …



START INTERVIEW

TAPE #016

DIRECTIONAL

Ambrose: Well, the Spanish-American War certainly was the beginning of the American Century, but nobody thought to call it that until Henry Luce did in the 1940s. It propelled America onto the world stage, brought America a colonial empire that made American interests, already quite large in the Pacific, even bigger and obviously so Puerto Rico and the new relationship with Cuba. So it was this tremendous energy that had been built in the United States after the Civil War with the Industrial Revolution and the movement West and the immigration into the United States and the growth of the country. It was just bursting with energy, and it came out in 1898 as we extended American power south and to the West and became a world power.

INT: How is this in line with Frederick Jackson Turner?

AMBROSE: It was very commonly felt that with the closing of the frontier which had been announced by the census taker in 1890 and then made into a whole theory of American history by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, that we had to find some new outlet for our energy, for our dynamic nature, for this -- for this coiled spring that was the United States. And the frontier gone was something akin to a panic among people. "Geez, if American institutions can't expand, they're gonna shrink." And so there was a kind of an intellectual justification, rationalization'd be a better way to put it, for “Let's get our power overseas.”

INT: What sort of American institutions needed to expand?

AMBROSE: Not military, no. The United States lagged far behind the rest of the world in both naval and land power. But the output of the factories, the output of the farms, the need for new markets, the common wisdom that you either expanded or you died, and that provided a justification for this impulse to imperialism that swept the country. By no means did everybody sign on to it. Many were very much afraid of it and opposed to it, but it provided a justification. And it came out of the hard work of the American people -- in the mines, in the fields, in the factories and what they were able to produce and that common knowledge wisdom that you've got to expand those markets or you're gonna die.

INT: How long had the Philippine conflicts been in the planning specifically?

AMBROSE: There's a point ...

DIRECTIONAL

A: There's a point of view on the taking of the Philippines that this was a conspiracy hatched by John Hay and Teddy Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan and others who were going to use this crisis in Cuba as an excuse to get America to go out, Puerto Rico, the protection for what was going to be an American Panama Canal, Hawaii, and the Philippines. And the Philippines, in this view -- there's some truth to this -- were just unknown to the great bulk of the American people. President McKinley is reputed to have said -- this was very widely believed -- I don't think it's true -- that when Dewey telegrammed him that he had sunk the Spanish fleet at Manila, McKinley called for an atlas so he could figure out where the Philippines were. So there is this conspiracy kind of arrangement to it that -- or as-- ahm, conspiracy kind of aspect to the thing. And that story takes on greater force when you look at Teddy Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy sending orders off to Dewey, “In the event war with Spain,” which he expected momentarily, “proceed to Manila and sink the Spanish fleet.” Ahm ... ah, that came very close to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy making the decision that “We're going to take the Philippines as a part of this war against Spain,” not necessarily against the President's wishes, but without the President's knowledge.

INT: What was Roosevelt's specific motivation regarding changing the national character ...

AMBROSE: Roosevelt was born in 1857 and, like others born in the 1850s, he had grown up listening to stories of his father's generation about the Civil War. And it was a very strong feeling among young men, and this would especially apply to Roosevelt's class, the natural leaders, as they thought of themselves, the Harvards and the Yales, that they had been deprived of their opportunity, that they hadn't been able to go out there with Oliver Wendell Holmes and stand at the battle front with Abraham Lincoln and follow Grant down into Petersburg and then on into Richmond. They had missed all of that. It's something that I feel myself. I was born in 1935 and I grew up listening to World War II stories and I feel cheated that I wasn't a part of that. Well, these guys felt cheated and they wanted to prove their manhood. This was, as everyone knows, terribly important to Teddy Roosevelt, but to many others, too. And so there was a feeling of "It's our turn. We want to get out there and be heroes." And that is the origin really of the John Hay "splendid little war" line. It was exactly the war they were lookin' for, a war that would give them a chance for glory, but, you know, you're only gone for six months. Doesn't take all that long. You're not disrupting your career all that badly. And you're not getting shot, or at least not in the way that men got shot at Cold Harbor or Petersburg or in the Civil War battles. But you feel that whiz of the ball going by your ear, you hear that crack as it does, and you're a veteran. You're a man of war.

INT: Did the war accomplish that?

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: Well, certainly the war made Americans proud. They had gone out and licked Spain that had been thought to be one of the world's great powers. Yeah, of course, it did. We'd gone out and licked Spain. This was one of the world's great powers, people thought at least up 'til that time. And we had done it quickly and efficiently without a great deal of loss of life. And so it was very -- and very big gains in territory. So, of course, it was very popular. With -- I mean but, you know, this the United States. We're a very diverse country. There were an awful lot of people who were very much opposed to this and thought that this was violating our own Constitution and certainly violating the whole American idea of self-determination and it was embarrassing to be the first colony to revolt in the modern times and to establish its independence, it's now suddenly becoming an imperialist nation. A lot of people were embarrassed by this. And, in my own view, I must say rightly so.

DIRECTIONAL, CUT, DIRECTIONAL

INT: Talk about Mahan's agenda regarding the Navy.

AMBROSE: Well, Mahan was, as everyone knows -- Alfred Mahan, everybody knows, was a great naval power advocate. He wrote the book on the British had taken over so much of the world thanks to its sea policy. The United States needed such a policy, that we were a two-ocean country, that we had to have a fleet that could control both oceans and this was going to require coaling stations and outposts out there, and if America wanted to take her place as one of the great nations in the world, she had to get into the imperialist race and had to acquire colonies. And this had a tremendous appeal to young men like Teddy Roosevelt and John Hay and -- and the others who were a part of that Mahan circle. It had a very big impact. Roosevelt, as President, of course, put the great white fleet together and started America on the road to becoming the world's number one sea power and there's a direct line that needs from Mahan's study up in Newport, Rhode Island at the Naval War College, where he wrote this stuff, right on into action and on into then results and the acquisition of the American colonial empire.

INT: What about the unifying effect after the Civil War?

AMBROSE: One of the features of the Spanish-American War was an orgy of reconciliation between former Confederates and former Yankees, and it was a great thing for the nation. Almost everybody agreed on this, that you've now got kids from Alabama fighting alongside, instead of against, the kids from Minnesota. You've got kids from Texas fighting with Teddy Roosevelt and his crowd from New York and the Rough Riders. And this was thought to be a very great thing. There's a cute little story that comes out of this. One of the generals in the Spanish-American War named Wheeler had been a Confederate officer and he was gettin' pretty old by this time, a little bit long in the tooth, and he was involved at San Juan Hill and is supposed to have said as the Spanish started retreating and the charge up the hill was going with, "Go get 'em, guys. We got those Yankees on the run!"

DIRECTIONAL, CUT, DIRECTIONAL

INT: Talk about the disembarkation at Tampa.

AMBROSE: They embarked at Tampa.

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: Well ...

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: The scene in Tampa was just chaotic with people fighting to get on board ships and elbowing other guys aside to get on board ships and no staff officers there to help and no plan or rhyme or reason to it and "How are we gonna load this ship and what supplies do we need for that ship," and all the things that go into an invasion. This was all brand new. Shafter was handling problems that no American Army officer before had ever had to handle and they were just terrible at it. This was a general staff that had been built to fight the Indian wars. This was an army that had been built to fight the Indian wars and all of a sudden they're going to undertake the most difficult of all military operations, an amphibious offensive against a defending shore line. Now in the packing up at at Tampa and in the disembarking from the ... in the packing up at Tampa Bay, chaos reigned and it was ... to put a perspective on the chaos that reigned at Tampa, remember that at Galipoliin the First World War now -- now this is almost two decades after the Spanish-American War -- the British put ships ashore that had troops on 'em and then other ships ashore that were carrying the rifles and the cannons and the other weapons and then on other ships they had the powder. So you -- you've got to be a little bit more generous in looking at Shafter and his staff and their mistakes and realize, you know, guys, this is the first time this had ever been done in the Modern Age. And, of course, they made terrible mistakes.

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: Well, the staff studies were -- yes. What was impact of the chaos that reigned in 1898? It was a creation of a modern army, beginning with Elihu Root and the reforms at the War Department that came about under Teddy Roosevelt's Presidency, because Teddy had been there. And he'd seen how bad the American Army was. And had insisted that it had to be reformed and had to be improved and had to be professionalized and had to be modernized and had to be brought out of its Indian hunting mode. And he did it with Elihu Root and brought in the general staff system into the US Army and great strides forward were made as a result of mistakes and the lessons learned from them in Tampa and in the disembarking at Daiquiri.

INT: What happened when they disembarked at Daiquiri?

AMBROSE: Well, they ... it could hardly have been worse. One thing was that the transports were civilian vessels. The navy had told Shafter, "You've got to get a naval officer on board those transports and you've got to give him command or those guys aren't going to go anywhere near the shore line because that's their ships at risk." Well, the War Department decided, "No, we're not gonna do that. It's cheaper to hire a civilian transport rather than turn them into navy vessels," and then the War Department refused to buy marine hazard insurance for them. So that these guys running these transports, a hodge-podge of a fleet, refused to go closer than five miles inland, for fear of the Spanish guns, which in fact were not there on the shore line. So you get this scene in the D-Day for 1898. The guys come down off the ships into the rowboats that have to be rowed five miles inland, a pretty heavy sea. Of course, they don't have their weapons with them. They've got their rifles, but they don't have any artillery with 'em. And they're coming into a war where the sea is doing this on 'em and when they get on a rise, they have to throw their weapons up onto the wharf and then down they go again and then they rise again and they grab up for guys that are up there on top to help 'em to get out. And, of course, this didn't do any good with their mobility, which was horses and mules. You couldn't take them in in rowboats. What are you going do with 'em. Well, you throw 'em overboard and they'll swim to shore and then you gather 'em up. But in the Rough Rider Regiment, the figures are something like of the 189 mules, three got ashore and were recovered. Roosevelt had two horses, one of which swam out to sea and they couldn't turn the horse around. So he -- he only had one horse for the campaign.

INT: What was the interaction between the Cubans and the Americans at first and how did it change?

AMBROSE: How the Americans and Cubans related to each other -- how the Americans related with the Cuban rebels is a story of missed opportunities. There was some contact, but it really was minimal. No effort was made. I don't know quite how they would have done it either, come to that. But no effort was made to get in contact with the -- the one things that rebels can supply -- the two things that rebels can supply are, one, intelligence. They're there on the scene. They can say, "There's a Spanish company over here and they got some artillery over here and that bridge isn't defended." And you can count on that intelligence. It's the best intelligence of all. "I saw it." That was one thing that the rebels could have given them. And the other was the harassing of supply lines. You know, you have in your mind now long trains of mules packin' bags of rice goin' up to the Spanish positions. That's pretty easy to disrupt that kind of a supply line. And that could have been coordinated. But that's asking the men of 1898 to be like the men of 1944, who had, of course, radios, airplanes for reconnaissance, all kind of ways to establish liaison with each other. None of that was available in 1898. And so the potential asset of the Cuban rebels was, in my view, not exploited to anywhere near the degree that it could have been.

INT: Did the Cubans need American help?

AMBROSE: You mean did the Cuban need American help?

INT: Yes.

AMBROSE: Well, there's dispute about that, as you heard this morning. Ah ... my own view is that the Spanish were not going to get out and they were not on the run. The Cuban revolution had been going on since 1868. This is 30 years later, and they don't appear to have been any closer to achieving the goal of getting the Spanish to march out of Havana and get on ships and go on home and say, "You guys figure out how you want to run your lives. We're outta here." Spain was not even close to that. This Spanish felt they could hold on and intended to hold on. There was also a fear in Spain that "If we give up this gem of our empire," and, remember, the Spanish had been giving up over the years quite a lot, I mean the whole of the Central and South America that they'd had to retreat out of. And now they had to go out of the -- out of Cuba, the gem in the Caribbean, and out of the Philippines, the gem in the Pacific. There was a fear in Spain that this would lead to the overthrow of the monarchy, a revolution, and all kinds of terrible things were gonna happen. So there -- so the best that I can see it, the Spanish, in 1898, were somewhat like the Japanese in 1945. They had no hope of winning, but they weren't about to quit.

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: General Lineares, on the Spanish side, in command at Santiago, counted on disease as his ally. He knew, and he was certain -- and in fact it did happen -- that after June came and you get into July, virtually all the American troops are going to get malaria. And as many as 25 percent of 'em would be down at any one time, and by "down" I mean flat on the back, unable to operate at all. And then in July the yellow fever was going to start. And these things were certainly. I mean nobody knew what caused malaria. Nobody knew how yellow fever was transmitted, much less what to do about it. And so Yankees in Cuba at that time got malaria, period, and they got yellow fever and this was the potential great ally of the Spanish. And it's why Shafter moved things forward as fast as he possibly could, to get a decisive campaign finished before the malaria and yellow fever hit.

DIRECTIONAL

INT: Talk about role of the press in SPAM.

AMBROSE: Sure, the New York press over ...

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: The New York and the national -- the New York and the national press covered this -- I mean this was just wonderful for them. Coming out of the depression, all the news had been bad news. Now we're going to war. And these reporters were any different than Teddy Roosevelt and his buddies. They'd been reading about the Civil War. They'd been hearin' about the Civil War. They were dyin' to cover a war and here came a war and it was a glorious war to cover. Exotic place, an enemy that it was easy to despise, real heroes, all the color of the Rough Riders and everything else that went into it. So in a lot of ways the war was over-covered, as many wars are. The Spanish were able to use the New York newspapers to get information on the gathering of the fleet at Tampa and the disembarking from Tampa and where the fleet was going and on and on and on, rather like in today's world Saddam Hussein watches CNN to find out what the Americans are up to.

INT: Are there other ways the media guides foreign policy decisions?

AMBROSE: Well, the -- the Hearst press and the yellow press in general in 1898 is generally given the credit, or the blame, for having started the Spanish-American War, that this was a war made up by the newspapers and in the more extreme charges, in order to increase newspaper circulation. And both things happened. We did go to war and newspaper circulation (Laughs) did increase very much. You know, you get a war, pulls the country together and it gets everybody fascinated. We all glue to the tube nowadays to watch CNN if the war is coming on. Well, they got the -- the Hearst papers in 1898 to see what was happening in the war coming on. And Hearst was certainly very much stirring all of this up and there is a point of view that has got some validity to it that this was the newspapermen's war, they created the war, foreign policy by the newspapers.

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: Well, not really, certainly not in World War II, because the press was so divided and -- and if you want to talk about a hundred years later in 1998 ... ah, I suppose that you could make a case that the press is driving us. I mean when you show this, it's going to be either we have done it or we haven't done it. I don't know if we're gonna do it or not. Ah, if we -- if we do go to war with Saddam, if it's even just air strikes, there will be a certain amount of "Clinton was pushed into this by the newspapers." I don't know that the media so much -- the media today can make foreign policy in the same way that William Randolph Hearst did by concentrating on a subject, that is, taking us to Somalia, taking us to Haiti and showing us what's going on there and making this a feature of the evening news every night and having CNN roll it and roll it and roll it and roll it. And you do get a media-driven foreign policy in some ways out of that. So there is that direct parallel between the yellow press of 1898 and the media hype that goes on in 1998, except you're going to show this in 1999 ...

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: Well, that -- that talks to the media and war. Hearst didn't create this out of a vacuum. There had to be a market out there that he could exploit before he could have an impact. And so which comes first? The desire for war was felt very strongly by an awful lot of people for a lot of different reasons in 1898 that ranged from sellin' more newspapers to establishing coaling stations all around the world to civilizing and Christianizing the "heathen in the Philippines", as they thought of it, and straight economic motives of getting a bigger market or getting access to raw materials. And all of these things played a part. I mean war is a very complex thing. When a great nation goes to war, even when it's so small a saw as the Spanish-American War, there are just all kind of factors that go into why did it happen? Why did we go to war instead of finding a diplomatic solution with the Spanish? Now to come more directly on that question, by the time of February-March in 1898, any spark was gonna set this off because of the way in which the Spanish misrule, as we saw it and I certainly do today, too, of Cuba had been played to the American people. And they had reached a point -- now if this were live TV, I could do this, but I can't do (Unintell.) -- but we had reached a point in 1898 that rather like in February of 1998, that the build-up had been so great in 1898, much of it led by President Clinton himself (Unintell.) -- it doesn't give us a comparison with McKinley, who was not feeding the flames. That anything short of a Spanish withdrawal from Cuba was unacceptable to the American people. And they weren't gonna pull out. So in that sense, war had become inevitable by the creation of a climate of opinion that centered on Spanish misrule in Cuba, but had very much more going to it, like Spanish misrule in the Philippines and Spanish misrule in Puerto Rico.

INT: What about Roosevelt's interaction with the media?

AMBROSE: Well, ah ...

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: In the first place, Teddy Roosevelt was a professional politician one of, if not the very best at it in the 20th century and a big part of that being in knowing how to cultivate the press and how to manipulate the press. And he was an absolute master at that. He didn't suddenly learn this in Cuba, that you can do this and do that for the guys in the press corps and then they're gonna reward you with good stories; he'd been doin' this for 17 years. And he was way better than the professional officers who had no idea in the world how to do PR with the press. So Teddy had Richard Harding Davis and the other famous correspondents gathered around him. He was magnetic anyway. And he was able to give the American people, through these correspondents, the view that he wanted them to have of this war. And he was just the best that there was at this.

INT: What's the image of Roosevelt that endures from the war?

AMBROSE: Well, the overwhelming -- the number one image of the Spanish-American War in the minds of the American people from the time that it was fought right on down today is Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill on his horse, standing out there all by himself, Spanish sharp shooters up there shooting at him, obviously the most visible target, by far, on the battlefield, tellin' his guys not "Charge" -- "Follow me." He was out in front and the Rough Riders didn't have any horses. They were all on foot coming up behind him. And that image of Teddy Roosevelt propelled him right on into the White House.

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: (Laughs) One of the big differences in the Spanish-American War is there were a lot of Harvards and Yales in the Spanish-American War, a big difference between America in the Vietnam War and America in World War II. In World War II the American elite was out there and young members of the American elite were junior officers. And the kids from Harvard and Yale were -- were out there with the GIs, acting as second lieutenants commanding rifle platoons. Do you know that every congressman in World War II who had a son, that son was in the Army or the Navy in the Second World War? By the time of the Vietnam War, almost none were. That's a big difference.

INT: Characterize McKinley as a President.

AMBROSE: McKinley is something of a cipher to me, but -- you can't use this because I don't know enough about the Spanish-American War. But McKinley, ahm ... did not direct war operations in anything like the way even Woodrow Wilson did, and he didn't take a very active role. McKinley had as his example before him, Abraham Lincoln, who took a very active role in directing the strategy of the Civil War. McKinley, by contrast, had a very passive role as President and Commander-in-Chief in 1898. And McKinley in contrast, to Franklin Roosevelt in the Second World War, played a passive role.

INT: Talk the role of African American soldiers.

AMBROSE: The two black regular Army regiments who were the real heroes at Las Guasimas and again at San Juan Hill, they got no credit for it, of course. Now partly that's 'cause they were black troopers. But it's more than that. It's because they were regular Army soldiers and they didn't have any PR guys in their outfit. And Roosevelt had all the correspondents with him and Roosevelt stood out on the battlefield. Don't ever make any mistake about that. Teddy Roosevelt was a genuine hero who did put his life on the line and did great things and got men to follow him up the hill, but he also made sure that everybody saw it. And the black regiments, they just went about their business like regulars do and nobody paid any attention and they never got the credit that they deserved.

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: Well, McKinley -- depends -- in part, it depends how you count century, but McKinley was the first President of the 20th century, not very long into the 20th century. But he is very much a part of that bunch of Presidents who came after the Civil War who are notable to us today because nobody can remember their names. I mean they're so forgettable, and McKinley is almost in that category, as opposed to Teddy Roosevelt, who is the most memorable of Presidents, certainly one of them, and the first modern President in so many ways, not just that he became President in 1901 and was the youngest President ever. He's a first President that we've got on film. He's the first President we have recordings of. He's the first President who had a genuine world policy and a strategy and who was very actively involved in the affairs of the world, far more so than any previous American President had ever been.

DIRECTIONAL

Tape #017

INT: US policy with Cuba after 1898.

AMBROSE: Oh, that's way too big a question and I don't want to get into all of that, but there is a little piece in there that is always -- struck me. The reason we didn't -- I mean the whole point of war was to take over Cuba from the perspective of many of the people who were advocating war. It was nat-- I mean the United States had lusted for Cuba for a long time and with the Panama Canal in the offing, it was even more important. But in this excess of patting ourselves on the back and how wonderful we are, 'cause we're going off not to conquer Cuba, but to free her from the Spanish oppressors, in the excitement of the vote for war, Teller of New York put in an amendment saying that none of the money -- this was to the expenditure bill -- none of this money is to be used to conquer Cuba; it's only to be used to free -- and nobody dared vote against it, even though an awful lot of 'em would have wished that they could have voted against it. So we went into the war saying, "We're not gonna take over Cuba." I've often thought that ... it's worth contemplating what would have happened if Cuba had been annexed by the United States and made a part of the American colonial empire. It's possible that Cuba in the 1950s would have followed Alaska and Hawaii and become a state in the Union. And that would have meant that all of the minimum wage laws and the regulation of corporation laws and all the rest that was a part of the American system would have applied to Cuba. And it's tempting at least to think that the Cubans would have been better off if that had happened. But it didn't.

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: Too general.

CUT, DIRECTIONAL

A: I mean as America became a greater and greater nation, as the industrial capacity and the agriculture capacity increased and the population increased, of course America was going to be extending herself out further into the world than just beyond the area covered by the Monroe Doctrine -- out into the Pacific, out into the Atlantic, come to that. I mean in 1917 we were going to go to war in Europe big time as a part of this whole extension of American power. Just by becoming big, we necessarily assumed responsibilities in the world. We were feeding so much of the world. We were importing. We were exporting. We were a part of the world and what happened in the political realm and the military realm was going along parallel with what was happening in the economic realm.

CUT

DIRECTIONAL

AMBROSE: I don't want to get into the open door of China.

INT: Do you see any parallels between the Philippines and Vietnam?

AMBROSE: Yeah, there are a lot of parallels. There are a lot of parallels between the Philippines and Vietnam in the way the fighting went on, in the sending of American kids out into the jungles and out into these rice paddies and out into these villages. These were American kids who had had no introduction to the culture, couldn't understand the people, first of all, the language and then, beyond that, the way in which they lived and their mores and their religion and everything else that goes into making a culture was just all utterly alien to the American kids in the beginning of the 20th century in the Philippines just as it was for the American kids in the late 1960s in Vietnam. And whenever you send an 18 or a 19 year-old out into the world and give him a gun and tell him to go and kill the enemy and hate the enemy, you're gonna have problems. You're gonna have the kind of thing that happened at Wounded Knee, or the kind of thing that happened in the Philippines with the American troops torturing their prisoners in the most you don't want to ever even think about it ways. And -- and just as you have American kids lighting those lighters, those Ronsons, and setting those thatched huts on fire in Vietnam, well, that happened also in the Philippines, the same sort of thing for the same general reasons. Throwing these way too young kids without really good officers into a situation in which they're scared all the time, they can't tell who's the enemy and who's a friend, they don't know who's going to lay a booby trap here or who's going to put one over there, they don't know that that kid goin' into that hut is just an innocent 12 year-old kid or if he in fact is a very active guerrilla who just killed your buddy yesterday. Yeah, there are very definite parallels.

INT: What about Roosevelt's turn-around on the Philippines?

AMBROSE: (Laughs) Well, insofar as Roosevelt deciding that that might not be the best idea in the world, we have the Philippines, he should have listened harder in 1898 to a lot of people who were saying at that time, "We're going to acquire these foreign people about whom we know very little or nothin', who are way, way far away, who have a culture that is not a part of ours. It's just south of Japan. If we have those islands, it's gonna draw us into a war in the Pacific that we're not going to have any great national interest in and it's gonna be a very bloody and very tough war to fight." And in some ways that's exactly what happened in 1941.

(END INTERVIEW)

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