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Rethinking the American Calamity
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Business New Haven
4/2/2001
By: Priscilla Searles
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Jay Winik, author of the just released book April 1865: The Month That Saved America (Harper Collins, 464 pps., $32.50 hardcover), will discuss the work at R. J. Julia Booksellers in Madison April 9 at 7 p.m. and at 2 p.m. the next day at the Yale bookstore. Winik was graduated from Lee High School in New Haven in 1975 and entered Yale, earning a B.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. Winik is a senior scholar at the University of Maryland and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Winik's first book, On the Brink: A Chronicle of the Cold War, outlines the case for Ronald Reagan's place in winning the Cold War.
How did you get into journalism and writing?
After a couple years on the Yale tennis team it became obvious that I wasn't going to be playing at Wimbledon. I took a semester off and did an internship with Connecticut congressmen Ronald A. Sarasin [a Beacon Falls Republican who served in the House from 1973-79]. When I came back I joined the Yale Daily News, and became a columnist and a senior editor. Then I went to the London School of Economics and was later asked by Les Aspin (then House Armed Services Committee chairman) to work for him in Washington. I was still in graduate school. We knew each other because I had written pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times about arms control. We had a terrific rapport. It was a big-time job for a young, inexperienced kid. I worked on nuclear issues, on strategy, on U.S.-Soviet relations, and I also wrote his speeches.
What in your government background brought you to writing on the Civil War?
I got a job on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for Sen. Chuck Robb [D-Va.] doing his foreign-policy work. We traveled all around the world. In the course of that I got a great deal of exposure to foreign civil wars. I was on the very first plane to go down to Phnom Penh since we had broken off relations [with Cambodia] after the Vietnam War. It so tense we were worried we might be shot down. The Vietnamese gave us a special route to fly. We didn't know who we would meet with. It was in 1989, when the civil war was just heating up again. We went to the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Serbia and the like and El Salvador and Nicaragua. So I've actually seen a number of civil wars personally.
How did you come to write the Ronald Reagan book, On the Brink?
After the Cold War had ended I thought, 'The most exciting issue of our time is gone.' And that's why I came to Washington. I got a nice book agent and ended getting a nice little book deal with Simon & Schuster. I just wanted to ask this question: How did the Cold War end? For a first book it did really nicely; it got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Why another book about the Civil War?
Outside of the Bible and Jesus, no subject has been written about more than the Civil War. So what can I possibly have to add? That's the immediate question anyone might have - including me. The irony is that because I come out of an entirely different background - a foreign-policy background, a defense background, having seen civil wars in other places - it gave me a fresh perspective to ask different questions than the Civil War historians had asked.
What was the most important question you asked?
Most civil wars end quite badly; ours easily could have. That question turned out to be a very fruitful question - far more interesting and compelling than I had even dreamed. The first thing to remember is at the time the Civil War took place America was a very young and fragile country, and we easily could have gone the route of a Northern Ireland or a former Yugoslavia. In that final month [April 1865] one of the crucial questions was, Would the South wage guerrilla warfare? That was Lincoln's greatest fear. That Robert E. Lee would take to the hills with his hearty horses and continue the war for one or two or more years. Grant was afraid of that and Sherman was terrified that the South would do that.
When Lee was retreating he actually was faced with the decision to wage guerilla war or not. The South had the riders for it, they really could have carried it out and were carrying it out in Missouri. Robert E. Lee turned it down, because he reasoned it would destroy the country - North and South - and that it was too high a price to pay.
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