Practicing History Read online

  Copyright © 1935, 1937, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981 by Alma Tuchman, Lucy T. Eisenberg, and Jessica Tuchman Matthews

  Introduction © 1981 by Barbara Tuchman.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, in 1981.

  All but two of the essays in this book have been previously published.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. Practicing history.

  Historiography—Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. History, Modern—20th century—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title

  D13.T83 1982 907’.2 82-8757

  ISBN 978-0-345-30363-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-79855-8

  www.atrandom.com

  Frontispiece: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch (© Rijksmuseum)

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover painting: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch (© Rijksmuseum)

  v3.1_c1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  I. THE CRAFT

  In Search of History

  When Does History Happen?

  History by the Ounce

  The Historian as Artist

  The Historian’s Opportunity

  Problems in Writing the Biography of General Stilwell

  The Houses of Research

  Biography as a Prism of History

  II. THE YIELD

  Japan: A Clinical Note

  Campaign Train

  What Madrid Reads

  “Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead”

  The Final Solution

  Israel: Land of Unlimited Impossibilities

  Woodrow Wilson on Freud’s Couch

  How We Entered World War I

  Israel’s Swift Sword

  If Mao Had Come to Washington

  The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story

  Kissinger: Self-Portrait

  Mankind’s Better Moments

  III. LEARNING FROM HISTORY

  Is History a Guide to the Future?

  Vietnam

  When, Why, and How to Get Out

  Coalition in Vietnam—Not Worth One More Life

  The Citizen Versus the Military

  Historical Clues to Present Discontents

  Generalship

  Why Policy-Makers Do Not Listen

  Watergate and the Presidency

  Should We Abolish the Presidency?

  A Fear of the Remedy

  A Letter to the House of Representatives

  Defusing the Presidency

  On Our Birthday—America as Idea

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Preface

  IT IS SURPRISING TO FIND, on reviewing one’s past work, which are the pieces that seem to stand up and which are those that have wilted. The only rule I can discover as a determinant—and it is a rule riddled with exceptions—is that, on the whole, articles or reports which have a “hard,” that is to say factual, subject matter or a personally observed story to tell are more readable today than “think” pieces intended as satire or advocacy, or written from the political passions of the moment. These tend to sound embarrassing after the passage of time, and have not, with one or two exceptions, been revived.

  Exceptions pursued every principle of inclusion or exclusion I tried to formulate. Two eyewitness accounts of historic episodes which I would have thought would read well in this collection failed, on rereading, to have the quality worthy of revival. One was an account of President Kennedy’s funeral, written for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the other an account of the reuniting of Jerusalem in June 1967 after the Six-Day War, written for the Washington Post. In the first case, presumably because of the opening paragraphs on the funeral of Edward VII in The Guns of August, I was asked to cover the Kennedy ceremony, and accepted more out of curiosity than commitment. Equipped with press card, I observed the lying-in-state in the Capitol rotunda, circulated among the crowds in Lafayette Square next morning, watched the rather haphazard procession of the visiting heads of state, with De Gaulle towering over the rest, attended the services at Arlington, and retired afterward to a hotel room to turn out my commentary by midnight for next morning’s paper. But what could one write when the entire country had been watching every moment of the proceedings on TV for the last thirty-six hours? One could not simply describe what everyone had already seen; one had to offer some extra significance. For me it was too soon: I did not share the mystique of Camelot; I had no sense at that moment of Kennedy’s place or significance in history, if any, and besides I was unnerved by the midnight deadline. My piece, which took a rather cool view, was a disappointment to readers who wanted the grand tone.

  On the occasion in Jerusalem, when against all advice Mayor Kollek ordered the barbed wire and no-man’s-land barriers removed, I was present and accompanied an Israeli family on a visit to Arab friends whom they had not seen in nineteen years, and watched Arab street vendors with their goats warily enter the New City, gaping at the sights and already choosing street corners where they could sell soft drinks and pencils. It was a day of tension and drama and immense interest, yet the report I wrote, like the Kennedy piece, lacked punch. These two examples, though not here for the reader to judge, illustrate the difficulty of establishing a principle of selection: I shared the emotion of the moment in one case but not in the other, and both results were flat.

  Oddly enough, a report on Israel written for the Saturday Evening Post (this page) in the previous year, on my first visit, turned out and still reads well, I think. Perhaps it was the freshness of the experience, perhaps the fact that I was writing for readers who, as I conceived them, probably knew little or nothing about the country and had no emotional tie to it. I wanted to convey the feeling, the facts, and the historical nature and meaning of the new nation all in one article. One does not always achieve one’s purpose in a given attempt, but this one, I believe, succeeded. Subsequently Fodor used it as the Introduction to their Guide to Israel for several years.

  Some of the essays in the following pages, like the little Japanese piece at the opening of Part II, require explanation of the circumstances that gave them rise. After graduating from college in 1933—the fateful year that saw the advent both of Franklin Roosevelt as President and Adolf Hitler as Chancellor—I went to work (as a volunteer—paying jobs did not hang from the trees in 1933) for the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, an international organization of member countries bordering on the Pacific—Britain, France, Holland, the U.S., Canada, as well as China and Japan. The directors felt at the time that the Japanese Council of the IPR, representing the hard-pressed liberals of the country, needed whatever encouragement and prestige the main body could give them, and to this end it was decided to make Tokyo the headquarters for the compilation of the IPR’s major project of the time, The Economic Handbook of the Pacific. Accordingly, the international secretary of the IPR, William L. Holland, was assigned to the Japanese Council in Tokyo to supervise work on the Handbook, and in October 1934 I followed as his assistant. I remained in Tokyo for a year and, after a month’s sojourn in Peking, returned home late in 1935 via the Trans-Siberian Railway, Moscow, and Paris
.

  During the year in Japan I had written a number of pieces for the IPR publications Far Eastern Survey and Pacific Affairs, generally on matters of not very avid public interest like the Russo-Japanese Fisheries controversy. However, on reviewing a book on Japan by a French historian, I was thrilled to receive from the author a letter addressed “Chère consœur” (the feminine of confrère, or as we would say, “colleague”). I felt admitted into an international circle of professionals. This, and the $40 paid for my first piece in Pacific Affairs, with which I bought a gramophone and a record of “Un bel di” from Madame Butterfly, made me feel I had begun a career.

  On returning to America, I tried to express something of what I had learned and thought about the Japanese in the little piece reprinted here. I do not remember when or how it was submitted to so august a journal as Foreign Affairs, but suddenly there I was in print, a novice of twenty-four, among the foreign ministers and opinion-makers and, more important, making the acquaintance of a wise and fine man, the editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong.

  Meantime, in 1936, I went to work for the Nation, which my father, Maurice Wertheim, a banker of rather eclectic interests, had bought from Oswald Garrison Villard to save it from bankruptcy. Freda Kirchwey, Villard’s successor as editor and a friend of my parents, was left in control, along with a new colleague, Max Lerner. My job at first was to clip and file a far-flung variety of newspapers and periodicals, and gradually to write some of the two-hundred-word paragraphs on current events which appeared each week on the Nation’s opening pages. Writing on assigned subjects one knew nothing about—recidivism, migrant labor, the death of Georges Chicherin, TVA, AAA, the Nye Munitions Committee, the Montreux Straits Convention, the Nazi Party Congress—one had to collect the relevant facts, condense the subject in two hundred words incorporating the Nation’s point of view, and have it ready on time. The experience was invaluable, even if the pieces were ephemeral.

  Accredited by the Nation, I went to Valencia and Madrid during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, and afterward stayed on in Europe, caught up in the frenzy of activities against non-intervention and appeasement and what was called by the other side “premature anti-fascism.” It was a somber, exciting, believing, betraying time, with heroes, hopes, and illusions. I have always felt that the year and decade of reaching one’s majority, rather than of one’s birth, is the stamp one bears. I think of myself as a child of the ’30s. I was a believer then, as I suppose people in their twenties must be (or were, in my generation). I believed that the right and the rational would win in the end. In London I put together a little book entitled The Lost British Policy, designed to show how it had always been a cardinal principle of British foreign policy to keep Spain (and the gates to the Mediterranean) free of control by the dominant power on the continent (currently Hitler). It was a respectable piece of research but, as a reviewer said, “tendentious.” I worked also for a weekly information bulletin called the War in Spain, subsidized by the Spanish government, but I have kept no files of my contributions.

  About the time of Munich I came home and continued to engage in Spanish affairs and in compiling a chronological record of the origins of the war in collaboration with Jay Allen, the most knowledgeable of American correspondents on Spain. With the defeat of the Republic in 1939 I met the event that cracked my heart, politically speaking, and replaced my illusions with recognition of realpolitik; it was the beginning of adulthood. I wrote a threnody on the role of the Western nations in the Spanish outcome, called “We Saw Democracy Fail,” for the New Republic, but as one of the pieces that embarrass me thirty-odd years later, it has not been included.

  On June 18, 1940, the day Hitler entered Paris, I was married to Dr. Lester R. Tuchman, a physician of New York, who not unreasonably felt at that time that the world was too unpromising to bring children into. Sensible for once, I argued that if we waited for the outlook to improve, we might wait forever, and that if we wanted a child at all we should have it now, regardless of Hitler. The tyranny of men not being quite as total as today’s feminists would have us believe, our first daughter was born nine months later. After Pearl Harbor and my husband’s joining the Medical Corps, the baby and I followed him to Camp Rucker in Alabama, and when he went overseas with his hospital early in 1943, we came home and I went to work for the Office of War Information (OWI) in New York.

  While the OWI in San Francisco broadcast America’s news to the Far East, our operations from New York were beamed to Europe. Because of my first-hand experience of Japan, such as it was, I was assigned to the Far East desk, whose task was to explain the Pacific war and the extent of the American effort in Asia to our European listeners. In the course of this duty I covered at second hand General Stilwell’s campaign in Burma, which remained in the back of my mind over the next twenty-odd years until it emerged as a book with Stilwell as the focus of the American experience in China.

  Otherwise, I cannot remember writing anything of any great interest while at OWI except two “backgrounders,” as they were called, in anticipation of expected events. One was on the history and geography of the China coast in preparation for an American landing, and one was on the Soviet Far East for use when and if Russia entered the war against Japan. The desk editor, a newspaperman by training, grew very impatient with my work on these pieces. “Don’t look up so much material,” he said. “You can turn out the job much faster if you don’t know too much.” While this was doubtless true for a journalist working against a deadline, it was not advice that suited my temperament. In any event, at that point the war suddenly ended, and I do not know what became of my “backgrounders.” I would like to read them again, but any papers I may have retained from OWI days seem to have vanished.

  Nothing appears in this collection from the 1940s nor until the last year of the ’50s, for the reason that after the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed, combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book. In 1948 I started work on my first book, Bible and Sword, which took six or seven years of very interrupted effort and quite a while longer to find a publisher. It was followed by The Zimmermann Telegram and then by “Perdicaris,” which, proving too slight for a book, was reduced to the short-story length that appears here.

  From the 1960s on, the selections speak more or less for themselves. “The Citizen Versus the Military” represents something of an aberration as my only commencement address (except for one in 1967 at my daughter’s graduation from Radcliffe, which is not included). For general use, I have a firm rule against commencement speeches, because I have no idea what to tell the young people and no desire merely to fill a required occasion with generalities. In 1972, however, on receiving the invitation to speak at Williams, I felt I did have something specific that I wanted to say about what seemed to me the foolish and mindless squawking of the young against ROTC and military service. I believed the war in Vietnam to be unjustifiable, wicked, and unsuccessful besides, but for the civilian citizen to leave the dirty work to the military while holding himself distinct from and above them seemed to me irresponsible and not the best way for the coming generation to gain control of our military policies. If they wanted to control the officer corps, I suggested, they should join the ROTC and then strike. Distributed by a newspaper syndicate, this speech was widely reprinted, besides, as I later learned, causing an irate alumnus of Williams to file a complaint about me with the FBI.

  Following the publication of Stilwell in 1971, I wrote a number of pieces on the American relationship to China and its echoes in Vietnam, but when the main theme has already been expressed in the book, reviving the ephemera serves no purpose. The exception is the Mao article (this page) which, as the first uncovering and report of this incident, is a piece of primary historical research of which I am rather proud. It was gratifyingly publicized by Foreign Affairs to mark their fiftieth-anniversary issue—and mark privately for me the awesome passage of thirt
y-six years since my first mousy penetration of their pages.

  Two absences which I rather regret are “The Book,” given as the Sillcox Lecture at the Library of Congress in 1979, and an essay of the same year entitled “An Inquiry into the Persistence of Unwisdom in Government.” The first seemed not to qualify as history for this collection. The second, which is now serving as the nucleus of a future book, is in retirement for the time being, until it emerges from the chrysalis.

  The texts that appear below are reprinted as originally published (or spoken), with one or two corrections of fact (Jacob, not, as originally appeared, Joseph, wrestled with the angel, an error no one caught until time for this publication), a few cuts and eliminations of repeated phrases, a few changes of awkward language, though none of ideas, and some changes of the published title in cases where editors had substituted their choices (invariably regrettable, of course) for mine. These have now had my original titles restored.

  Whether these selections when gathered together offer any philosophy of history is a question I hesitate to answer because I am rather afraid of philosophies. They contain a risk for the historian of being tempted to manipulate his facts in the interest of his system, which results in histories stronger in ideology than in “how it really was.” Yet I do not suppose one can practice the writing of history over a long period without arriving at certain principles and guidelines. From these essays emerges, I think, a sense of history as accidental and perhaps cyclical, of human conduct as a steady stream running through endless fields of changing circumstances, of good and bad always coexisting and inextricably mixed in periods as in people, of crosscurrents and counter-currents usually present to contradict too-easy generalizations. As to treatment, I believe that the material must precede the thesis, that chronological narrative is the spine and the blood stream that bring history closer to “how it really was” and to a proper understanding of cause and effect; that, whatever the subject, it must be written in terms of what was known and believed at the time, not from the perspective of hindsight, for otherwise the result will be invalid. While laying no claim to originality, these are principles I discovered for myself in the course of learning the craft and following the practice of my profession.