March of Folly

March of Folly

By Barbara Tuchman

I am sure you are familiar with the accusation on journalists where the editor says to the reporter here are the head lines go write the story and surround them with facts. The opening paragraph of this book introduces the headline thesis and then goes on to tell you how the story is about to unfold. I like that in an author. She goes on to provide a beautiful back drop in history as a collection of events where the common theme is a march of folly, that being irrational decisions made by leaders that goes against the better interest of their constituencies. The book is entertaining and a great summary of certain historical subjects, but her thesis is fraught, errors, omissions and with the same folly she thwarts upon leaders of state. She became wooden headed in her own argument.

In her introductory chapter she provides a general overview of moments in history that she could have chosen from. In her summary of WWI she discusses opportunities to have negotiated peace that were missed. She cites a German surrender when in fact an armistice was signed. This was indeed the Germans saying they were willing to negotiate a peace, only to be stabbed in the back. She also alludes to the Moor’s conquering of Spain. She claims that Spain was taken by Africans who happen to be Muslims as opposed to Muslims using African manpower to conquer Span. She claims that Muslims contributed to Western civilization as opposed to conquered Westerners moving this forward. While I will not attempt to take a side in the case of the Moors, I point to the mere fact that Wikipedia has frozen the entries on the subject because of the contentious disagreement on the authors version. With these gross errors in framing her thesis I became a suspect reader.

She chose to speak on Troy, The Renaissance Popes, and The American Revolution from the British perspective, and Vietnam. Upon completion of the book I could not find a solid rationale for knitting these over others, to make her case. In further degradation of her case within each case I find merit in the suspicion I spoke of earlier. While I am not equipped to refute her historical research, in this review I only take an argument for the defense and use her rules of engagement in a post posthumous debate with any to take up her torch. Her rules are to judge the decisions made within the context of the time of the decision making and in context of what the decision makers knew. The consistent thread I found was that Barbara Tuchman provided evidence within her own history that acquits her defendants. Additionally, while she deluges the reader with the history she constructs; she leaves gaps, or errant inferences to construct her argument. In the case of Vietnam she closes with a paragraph citing an actual quote in history, while apparently true it disgraces anyone who gave their last full measure to that cause.

With the Trojan-Greek war after reading one thousand pages of the Iliad and the Odyssey I found it remarkable that of all the folly found with the Greeks in terms of why leaders take their people to war, I take issue with Tuchman’s focus on the Trojan Horse leaving so much pertinent detail on the table. She may have discussed a tactical error, but she overlooked all strategy and philosophy in going to war. I also take issue with her attempt to use a story that has deep mythological interlude to it over so many other possibilities. She uses intellectual puzzling to make a case that it doesn’t matter if the story is true or myth and by mere referencing numerous authors of fame there is merit in the rationale she claims. I am not buying it as authors, prone to the novel when writing history are not leaders and therefore she selects an unqualified test group.

My specific issues with her first argument go as follows: By referencing discoveries in archeological digs, it could be true…if it could be proven that the remains a horse is not a battering ram. She totally overlooks how long it would take to get the Horse moved from the beech to inside the city walls and the prospect of survival or the discovery of smell of human excrement is not discussed. She suggests that mythological rational along a line of passion in a material argument, which is clearly a character of folly. And all the while what does the tactical mistake of the Horse have to do with the Trojan rationale for the war in the first place. She overlooks rational thought that Greece needed a superficial cause to unite their States as a possibility, a rationale that exactly what worked for Bismarck’s when he took Alsace –Loraine. She draws religion in to discussion and equates the Greek gods and our One God as the same. Greek gods were highly symbolic, with man made rationale while One God is spiritual in nature, where man corrupts it with a passion for power. The contrast throws a huge log into the spokes of her analogy. She attempts to contrast the rationale in terms of fate and free will. Fate is your free will when you recognize reality for what it is, which is not to be confused with leaps in science whose fate is to recognized nature and construct it to enhance our living condition in this world. So now the train of thought in support of her argument has lost too many wheels to support the weight of its argument as we round first base headed for second.

Tuchman’s second example is the Renaissance Popes. You have to be somewhat knowledgeable about Western Civilization in the post Roman Empire, or the Holy Roman Empire in order to find it plausible that the example actually fits her argument. For those with a fingernails grasp of what they learned in “Western Civ”, would remember that first the Papal States, insignificant as they were in terms of territory and power where ruled by kings and influenced by the Church. Second by the time the renaissance period dawned, the Church had endured 85 years where the papal curia sat in France and where heavily influenced by the rulers France. So this reader becomes at least highly suspicious of her ability to win a case in court, albeit the history is rich with detail not found in the average history book. So rich that you are sure you are reading a academic text book instead of hearing oral arguments from the Supreme Court of Historians.

I summarize the beginning of her Renaissance Pope argument as follows: At about the time Columbus discovered America – the Renaissance – which is to say the period of values of this world replaced those of the here after – was in full flower in Italy. This is a tug at a thread she left with Troy with its noose around the church. The agenda of too many academia nuts starts to show itself. She then follows with an assessment that the Popes folly was of perversity, perhaps the most consequential in Western history, if measured by its results in centuries of ensuing hostility and fratricidal war. It was a war where the King of France demanded that a Pope, so full of vices, so abominable in the eyes of the world must be removed, in order that a new pope be elected. Just such action, initiated by the Cardinals and resting on the support of the King of France, had caused the schism of recent memory, and nothing in Christian history had done the Church such irretrievable harm. What actually read is that entangled with a perverse lifestyle, prominent of the times, was an entanglement of the Papacy and the Monarchies to the extent that distinguishing the two becomes a cats-cradle.

Tuchman abides by another rule in her thesis which to show there was an alternative in the decision making of the rulers that could have taken place. With the Popes, in the political sphere, the alternative would have been a consistent institutional policy consistently pursued. If the popes had directed their energies to that end instead of dissipating their efforts in the petty paths of private greed, they could have maneuvered the hostilities of the secular powers in the interests of the Papal States. She forgets two things, first is the Spiritual agenda of the Catholic Church, weighed against course in perversity. But one cannot ignore the breakdown in her argument on alternative when she provides a pagan-christen dichotomy as follows: “meanwhile a new faith, nationalism, and a new challenge in rise of national churches were already undercutting Roman rule in the 15th century. To the extent pagan rulers fell in love with pagan antiquity, Italians of the ruling class felt less reverence for Christianity, which as Machiavelli wrote in The Discourses’, makes the “supreme felicity to consist in humility, abnegation and contempt of things human,” whereas pagan religion found the chief good in “grandeur of the solid, strength of the body and all qualities that make men redoubtable”.” Her alternative, given the church and the monarch of that time are indistinguishable breaks down in her own disclosure of history. As an attorney for the defense, using only the briefs provided by the prosecutor, while there is an over abundance of evidence to perversity, the argument for folly, that takes their people to war is fraught with enough conflict to acquit as you sort out “who the people” really are.
Tuchman moves on to the British version of the American Revolutionary war. Another of Tuchman’s rules in her thesis is to judge the leaders by the standards of their times. This rule is at least compromised as she sets the standards of the latter have of the 18th century where 200 families, including the Royal Family rule England, they all went to the same schools and learned the same line of thought and held the same ignorance to compete. This situation becomes exasperated when they have a king who inherited a throne at an incompetent age of 21. Cynical as he was fatherless and raised in conflict, low in character, whimsical in decision making as he fond himself appointing one faction then another and finally with no comprehension of the world and his colonies state of affairs brings a question of character or qualification and certainly not a question of folly in the a leader’s decision making pertinent to the continuance of the colonies.

With the overall foundation of Tuchman’s third example in deep trouble, she spends a tremendous amount of ink writing on the administrators, of the time making not irrational decisions, but decisions blind to the voice of Americans. There was an overarching need to recover economy to pay for the French seven years war causing a Royal Imposition of taxes, am imposition on trade, an Encampment of officers in homes and businesses to collect tax and tariff which are all logical decisions to maintain their Colony. One must have to remember, there was mutual lack of respect towards the colonial contribution to the French Indian war and a Colonial distrust of England’s need to stand up an army. There was an undercurrent of separation already afoot. It was the first step to ending the paradigm of colonialism, which until after Vietnam, her forth argument, you could hardly judge the British harshly using Barbara Tuchman’s guidelines.

In rounding third and headed for home Tuchman drags America once again through the pains of Vietnam. Written in 1984, four years in to Reagan’s road to rediscover American pride, this author had her head buried into an agenda that was overrun by history in the making. She missed the boat. There is a lot I found to criticize her accounting of the Vietnam trauma on the world. Was there folly? Of course there was. Did she capture it accurately? She came close. Did she frame it properly, not a chance. Did she circle up with her thesis,? I think she got lost in the rhetoric of the 70’s as she beat a solo drum of folly.

Again the damning evidence is in her detailed accounting of history that begins in 1919 and ends in 1975. Just stop and try to imagine how much world history that took place that may have overrun any decision taken by any American leader. If you are not up on history think back on the Depression, WWII, Korea, China, the Cold War that directly confronted the leaders that brought us into the Vietnam war. To think that any train of folly may have been derailed by superseding events is not very hard to do. And that is Tuchman’s grand mistake. So I call it a double play as she is tagged out at second and then again at the plate as she insults Americans who gave their last full measure.

In summary our involvement or the beginning of her case for folly begins with Woodrow Wilson as he denied Ho Chi Minh and his people the right to self determination which sent him off on a visit with Lenin in the new USSR. The Bolshevik phenomena captured everyone’s attention as early as 1900 and totally distracted Wilson from recognizing that the folly in colonialism that was only budding in 1776 was now in full flower on its last day. Hence the French once again find a way to perpetuate the oppression and extortion of people who are not French. While Roosevelt who was fully sympathetic with the Vietnamese in 1945, he was preoccupied with closing out WWII, The Red Threat from the USSR and his own death. Truman in his stead was equally concerned with the Red Threat as we first lost China to it and then North Korea. It was a real deal of the times and carried its day as an overriding factor to aid the French in their colonialism, not to perpetuate colonialism but the continued rampage of the falling dominos, that were falling as Czechoslovakia, Hungry, and Cuba also fell before Kennedy committed combat troops in 1962. To accuse our leaders of not being keen to the dominos theory is not looking at the bigger picture.

So while America is not innocent of making mistakes of folly, I must point to where I agree with her in part where folly was detrimental to the will of her people. She reports that credibility emerged in the Berlin crisis of that summer of 1961 when, after a harsh intimidating meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy said to James Reston, “now we have a problem in making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place. Under Kennedy, increased activity required more than a training command. In February 1962 a full field command under the acronym MACV superseded MAAG with a Three-star general named Paul D. Harkins…If a date is needed for the beginning of the American war in Vietnam, the establishment of Mac-Vee as it became known, will serve. Being caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Kennedy evidently stung, lied at a news conference in February 1962, “we have not sent combat troops there – in the generally understood sense of the word. We have increased out training mission and our logistics support….” And this was ‘as frank as I can be” consistent that unfailing refuge, “our security needs in the area.” To this she writes ‘the United States is now involved in an undeclared war in South Vietnam,” wrote James Reston on the same day. “this is well known to the Russians, the Chinese Communists and everyone else concerned except the American people.” Kennedy was no wooden head; he was aware of the negatives and bothered by them, but made no adjustments, nor did any of his chiefs of staff.

Kennedy’s death left Johnson with a smoking gun that he mismanaged would be an understatement. Johnson faced a presidential election of 1964. Because his bellicose opponent was Barry Goldwater, he had to appear as the peace candidate. He took up the chant about “their” war; “ We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves. We do not want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. When six months later after he was elected, when American boys were sent into combat with no dramatic change of circumstance, these phrases were easily recalled, beginning the erosion of Johnsons credibility. The underlying need, given the rapid falling of the South, was to redress the military balance so that the United States should not negotiate from weakness. He was stuck between the tactics of fighting Kennedy’s undeclared war in conjunction with his campaign promises and the military decisions that were at hand, well documented in the Pentagon Papers, but missed by this author.

There was an alternative in 1962 that Tuchman missed, which was to tell the truth to the nation and the world and sell them on the reasons to go to war. On their own merit in 1962 that was plausible considering how fearful Americans of the color red. In hindsight to claim that the domino theory was an argument of folly is not winnable for either side. What we do know is that the relationship between the USSR and China fell in to a disaster. Meanwhile Kissinger and Nixon played ping-pong with the Chinese and relations warmed there. Also Chairman Mao’s death set China of in to a new direction. All accounts while very visible post 1962 or even 65 to the casual person of 35 years of age or older, Tuchman missed them in 1984. Why is that? They were events in history that would refute here thesis, and therefore the whole story need not be told by Tuchman. She told only what supported her argument and held her consistent with the rules of her argument. G.H. Bush and Colin Powell learned from that lesson and produced dramatic and opposite results in 1991, where it is plausible the same could have been achieved in 1962, making the argument not one of folly to go to war, but folly in the strategy in how to take a country to war.

In wrapping this up, I find Tuchman excellent in capturing intriguing detail in history. The history alone was entertaining. I concede that one book cannot capture it all when at that level. And so to apply an agenda to the history and omit critical surface events while burying the reader with detail, is an oft found flaw in academia that you must be on guard for. Tuchman is a renowned author of history, and therefore even within the system you must be mindful to keep your own bibliography of detail as you may be sold down the river. Where I find my highest degree of criticism in Tuchman’s effort here is when she writes: “The new political order in Vietnam as approximately what it would have been if America had never intervened, except for being far more vengeful and cruel. Perhaps the greatest folly was Hanoi’s – to have fought so steadfastly for thirty years for a cause that became a brutal tyranny when it was won.” And then three pages later she writes: The longest war had come to an end. Faintly from a distance of 200 years might have been heard Chatham’s summary of a nation’s self-betrayal: “by the arts of imposition, by its own credulity, through the means of false hope, false pride and promised advantages of the most romantic and improbable nature.” A contemporary summing it up was voiced by a Congressman from Michigan, Donald Riegle. In talking to a couple from his constituency who had lost a son in Vietnam, he faced the stark recognition that he could find no words to justify the boy’s death. “There was no way I could say that what had happened was in their interest or in the nation’s interest or in anyone’s interest.” All along the interest of the Ho Chi Minh and his Vietnamese people was the same freedom our soldiers fought for in WWI and was requested in the settlement of the peace in 1919. Connecting the historical dots was a betrayal to those fighting to preserve freedom for all men, the same freedom won in 1776 but lost in 1975.

I closed the book in total dismay. Not about the argument to or not to wage war as philosophically any path towards war should be labeled folly. Also keep in mind that is not the same argument to defend freedom, whether it is ours or someone else's. To sell out on America and choose Vietnam in this argument/thesis, was only to sell a book.

I have 10 pages of bibliography notes for those interested. Simply request and ye shall receive.