Puzzles for the future
Some secrets will unfold in years ahead. Others will last an eternity

BY MICHAEL BARONE

There will always be mysteries in history. We are not likely to know what Stonehenge was used for or why the Anasazi civilization crumbled, and there will probably always be debates about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Documents and artifacts that might have solved such mysteries have been long since lost or destroyed–or never existed. Carbon-14 dating, DNA tests, and other new scientific techniques can provide some answers. But they also raise new questions and produce new mysteries in turn. We will always be dogged by the fact that we cannot recapture what things looked like to people who did not know how they would turn out. "The past is a foreign country," wrote L.P. Hartley; "they do things differently there."

Future historians looking back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries will have an additional problem: too much evidence. Roberta Wohlstetter, in her definitive study of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, concluded that Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers had no advance knowledge of the attack, even though a historian looking through the documents later could find evidence that, if heeded, should have warned them. Her conclusion: "We failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of the relevant materials but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones." Future historians will have to search through the enormous hay stack of today's journalism–thousands of newspapers and magazines, the 24-hour cable news operations, Web sites that traffic in rumors and leaked documents–to find the few needles that truly tell the story. And some of those needles will be missing.

Gaps and gaffes. For there are always those who try to hide the truth, and truths that cannot be known. Gerald Posner's Case Closed makes a powerful case that Lee Harvey Oswald did indeed assassinate John F. Kennedy. But Oswald's thinking can never be definitively known. Nor can the motive of Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists continue to charge that the real killers and real motives have been hushed up; they may have some followers among historians a century hence. The National Archives is debating whether to use new technology to establish what caused the 18½-minute gap in Richard Nixon's White House tapes. But that will not tell us for certain why one of the shrewdest and most cerebral of 20th-century presidents thought he had to cover up a "third-rate burglary" of the opposition's headquarters, one that he almost certainly did not know about in advance. DNA technology forced Bill Clinton to admit the truth of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, but it could not tell us why Clinton behaved so recklessly, nor why Lewinsky did not take the famous blue dress to the cleaners. Journalism, as Washington Post publisher Philip Graham once said, "is the first rough draft of history." Sometimes it is less rough than others. Theodore H. White's Making of the President books, starting in 1960, were great journalism written like history, a template followed by journalists and historians since: setting an election battle in a time of social change, painting close-frame portraits of the candidates and their political strategists, using polls and in-person interviews to get into the minds of the voters. Future political history may not read much differently.

In contrast, there is an enormous gulf between even the best journalistic accounts of diplomacy and war and the memoirs and histories that come later, based on secret documents and secret discussions inaccessible to even the most assiduous reporter. Historians in the 22nd century will probably know much more than we do about Bill Clinton's Middle East peace negotiations, George Bush's assembly of the coalition to fight the gulf war, and Ronald Reagan's policies to undermine the evil empire of the Soviet Union.

More elusive is what G.M. Young in Victorian England: Portrait of an Age called "the real, central theme" of history: "not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening: in Philip Sidney's phrase, 'the affects, the whisperings, the motions of the people.'" Future historians may wonder why the 20th-century peoples of so many nations accepted, even welcomed, the totalitarian regimes that threatened to take over the world in the 1940s–and then chose to embrace democracy and freedom a few years or decades later. They may wonder why the American elite who rallied the nation to fight World War II and the Cold War soured on their own country by the late 1960s–just two decades before the American triumph in the Cold War. They may struggle to understand why some parts of the world–the United States, Latin America, the Islamic world, Korea, and Taiwan–saw a revival of religious faith, while other parts–Europe, Japan, China, Australia–moved from religion to secularism. We tend to take for granted the whisperings and motions of our time, these millions of changes of mind. But for future historians they may turn out to be the most puzzling mysteries of all.