The Role of Shock and Surprise (response article)

David Beisel’s article tells us that “when denied and repressed things suddenly take shape, shock and surprise often follow.” Surely no one familiar with modern psychology would deny that this occurs, at least in people’s personal lives. Beisel’s point, however, is that a pattern of shock and surprise following on the heels of denial and repression has characterized at least seven “military and diplomatic crises which the United States has unexpectedly faced since the beginning of the second World War.” Hence, Beisel asks that we “more critically examine” those seven crises for a pattern of denial and repression followed by shock and surprise. However, some important non-psychological facts are missing from Beisel’s summaries of the seven crises, so it seems premature to conclude that they do actually all share a psychological pattern of denial followed by repression followed by shock and

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surprise.

In Beisel’s account of the Pearl Harbor attack, most of what he writes seems to be tangential to these psychological patterns. He begins: “From the very moment of the attack, questions of who knew what, and when they knew it, took center stage and have remained central to our understanding of the Pearl Harbor attack ever since.” Here I beg to differ. For most Americans, anyway, the emotional significance of the Pearl Harbor attack has always centered on shock and surprise. In fact, “who knew what, and when” is just a tempest in a teapot. The idea that Franklin Roosevelt ever consciously or unconsciously wanted war between the U.S. and Japan is far-fetched. Starting when France fell in June 1940, Roosevelt ardently sought war between the U.S. and Germany. Neither he nor anyone else thought a U.S.-Japanese war would lead to a U.S.-German war; in fact, it was just the opposite. Thus, Roosevelt was trying to keep Japan’s pre-Pearl Harbor aggressions on the backburner of U.S. deliberations, but Secretary of State Cordell Hull out-maneuvered Roosevelt and pushed through anti-Japanese policies that provoked Japan to initiate war with the U.S. Therefore, it’s no wonder that (as Beisel concludes his Pearl Harbor section) “all the evidence shows that for days after December 7,” Roosevelt was “genuinely troubled and seriously depressed.” Until December 11 when Germany, totally unexpectedly, declared war against the U.S., Roosevelt thought his desired U.S.-German war was going to be indefinitely delayed.

Beisel then moves on to the Korean War, implying that North Korea’s June 1950 invasion of South Korea was a shock to Americans like the Pearl Harbor attack. I wish Beisel had actually examined such similarities for Americans between Pearl Harbor and Korea, and also had looked at differences between them. Instead, Beisel’s point here is that Stalin and China were negligently “cued by the U.S.” (in a speech by Secretary of State Dean Acheson) that the U.S. did not “include South Korea in America’s Asian defense perimeter.” This may be true, but it is not why Stalin supported North Korea’s plan to invade South Korea. Stalin didn’t support that invasion because he thought North Korea could “get away with it,” so to speak, but rather because he hoped it would lead to warfare between the U.S. and China, thereby preventing any

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U.S.-Chinese cooperation at the expense of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s hope was realized and U.S.-Chinese cooperation was delayed for over 20 years, until Nixon visited China in 1972. As for China back in 1950, its leaders realized at that time what Stalin’s true motive was, but Stalin’s support for Kim Il Sung’s invasion left Chinese leaders with no way to prevent the invasion.

Regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Beisel says that “the appearance of Soviet…missiles in Cuba was truly a surprise for most Americans and perhaps even for the Kennedy administration.” I’ve added emphasis here to Beisel’s “perhaps” because finding Soviet missiles in Cuba was a surprise for the Kennedy administration—as well as for other Americans. The only reason the U.S. had sent secret U2 spy planes over Cuba was just in case some sort of Soviet military aid showed up in Cuba. But regardless of that, the surprise of finding the missiles was not very similar to the surprise of Pearl Harbor or even the surprise of North Korea’s invasion, because it was obvious the Soviet motive wasn’t to attack the U.S. but to negotiate with the U.S. from a new position of strength.

Beisel moves on to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which, unlike the Soviet missiles in Cuba, was not a surprise to the U.S.—instead, as Beisel correctly implies, the second half of the Gulf of Tonkin incident was fabricated by the White House so as to better stampede Congress into granting war powers to President Johnson. Granted that those “attacks” by North Vietnamese naval forces surely came as a surprise to most Americans, nonetheless the small scale of the incident prevented it from being emotionally comparable to Pearl Harbor, and no popular cry for revenge or retaliation followed. Instead, Vietnam was assigned to victimhood solely by the Executive Branch of the U.S. government.

In the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979, Beisel emphasizes President Carter foolishly, and reluctantly, granting the Shah of Iran permission to visit the U.S. for cancer treatment. Many Americans then were surprised six days later when the American Embassy staff in Tehran was taken hostage by Iranian students. On the other hand, as Beisel points out, many well-informed Americans (including President Carter) were not surprised because they already realized how volatile anti-Americanism was in Iran. (In con-

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trast, in December 1941 even Americans who suspected that Japan might attack somewhere and somehow had no idea that Japan might attack Pearl Harbor from the air.)

Beisel’s account of how the 1991 Gulf War came about has a lot in common with his account of the Korean War’s origins, since here again the U.S. misinformed a potential enemy of its true position, thereby (he thinks) more or less inviting an invasion of a U.S. ally. In the Iraqi case, Beisel is on target, but he doesn’t mention the reason why the U.S. virtually invited Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. It was because Saddam had refused to reduce the size of Iraq’s military after the end of the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war, and the U.S. resolved to carry out that reduction itself, including by making anti-personnel cluster bombs—the U.S. “weapons of choice” in the Gulf War.

Finally, the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, where the effects of the attacks and their emotional significance for Americans were both on the same scale as Pearl Harbor. I fully share David Beisel’s desire for more study of the psychological similarity, for Americans, between Pearl Harbor and the September 11 attacks, and I agree with Beisel’s characterization of Pearl Harbor as “20^th century America’s Ur Trauma.” Psychological similarities between September 11 and Pearl Harbor truly deserve more study after these past ten years of the U.S. squandering lives, assets, and security in counterproductive post9/11 wars.

As he wraps up, David Beisel draws several conclusions from his seven cases. One is that “it is psychologically important for us to remain innocent victims, again and again.” With this I agree, but it seems applicable to more than just Americans. I also agree with Beisel that when we try to reconstruct the past, “we need to add considerations of unconscious compulsion and traumatic reenactment.”

My disagreement is with how well Beisel’s seven cases show “a pattern of unconsciously willed events that were unconsciously arranged,” or show that “out-of-the blue military disasters keep catching us by surprise because massive repression and denial continue to convince us we had no part in the arranging.” I would

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like to suggest that most of Beisel’s seven cases invite more conventional historical examination before choosing which psychological pattern or patterns they might share in common.

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