Brinkley-Bradley, Round One

Imus didn't intend to start a war between two highly regarded historians, but that's exactly what he did. Following yesterday's eloquent appearance by James Bradley to promote his new book The Imperial Cruise, Imus welcomed a fired up Douglas Brinkley to the show today, unaware that Brinkley was set on taking Bradley down.

(By the way, there's almost nothing funnier than the idea of two middle-aged historians engaging in some sort of hand-to-hand combat over Theodore Roosevelt.)

In The Imperial Cruise, Bradley claims that Roosevelt "giving" Korea to Japan in 1905 was the catalyst for Japanese expansionism, which ultimately led to the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. Brinkley called Bradley's thesis "overdrawn," and criticized his approach.

"He followed it backwards, like rewinding history," said Brinkley, whose most recent book, The Wilderness Warrior, focuses on Roosevelt's conservatism. "That's the wrong way to do it because we live our lives chronologically."

Instead of linking the 1905 cruise to the 1941 impact at Pearl Harbor, Brinkley said the real "kicking point" should be the Spanish-American War in 1898, where Roosevelt displayed his own imperialist nature by quitting his position as Assistant Secretary of State to go fight with the Rough Riders in Cuba, and expressing his desire for the U.S. to acquire Hawaii and the Philippines in the Pacific.

As President, Roosevelt furthered these goals by negotiating peace between Russia and Japan, and then making friends with the Japanese by allowing them their own sphere of influence in places like Korea, as long as they left U.S. interests alone.

"To make the leap that TR saying, 'We're not going to go to war with you over Korea' started World War II is acting as if we didn't have presidents after Roosevelt, like Taft, and Wilson for two terms, and Harding and Coolidge and Hoover, and then FDR," said Brinkley. "It seems to me to be a muddled thesis."

Bradley is looking at the events of 1905 "from a Korean point of view," Brinkley added. As he sees it, Roosevelt prevented Pearl Harbor from happening even sooner.

"He built our great Navy, and it scared Japan for a while," he said. "He bought us time."

As for Bradley's assertion that Roosevelt giving Korea to Japan had been a tightly guarded secret until now, Brinkley said, "It smacks me as a marketing ploy, or a repackaging," since he's been teaching it to his diplomatic history classes for 20 years.

Imus obviously loved every minute of this. "I can't tell you how delighted I am now that we have you and Bradley at each others' throats," he said, then, "Happy Thanksgiving!"

-Julie Kanfer