Over the last decade, I have read A Distant Mirror, The Sleepwalkers and The Best and The Brightest at least three times each and I am not stopping. Why do I keep reading them? I admit with shame that I have spent more time reading them than the Bible.
I think I know why I am so obsessed with them. I was (am) preparing for calamity.
Calamity arrived in 2020, but it didn’t go the way most of us thought it would, which makes us just like the people in these books. When Winnie-poo’s Flu arrived, these books had already provided me with a perspective and clarity the anastomosing media could not.
All three books are about calamities, ostensibly. But they are really about people, their proclivities and biases. But what homines calamitatem doesn’t have “personalities” involved? Calamity is personality.
The first book of calamity, A Distant Mirror, is about the 14th century’s gory wars and disease in Europe. But was it really so bad for everyone each of those 100 years?
Barbara Tuchman, setting out the chair and pillows for the reader in the introduction, poked fun at our modern nervous-Nellie culture with what she called, Tuchman's Law:
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (bold emphasis mine)
Tuchman wrote that in 1978. Oh, that she could have lived to see her law working through the smartphone!
As bad as the 14th century was, a lot of people were just fine, being afflicted by only a few mishaps and then only momentarily. Our modern information machine makes calamity seem ubiquitous, when it bloody well isn’t. I think the Black Death was bad, nonetheless. But what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger for the peasant uprising and siege later on.
Barbara Tuchman is best known for her 1962 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Guns of August about the start of WWI. President Kennedy ordered copies for all his military staff and cabinet. More on this later.
Tuchman was not a professional historian or an academic. Although historians got their dander up over the best-selling, The Guns of August, A Distant Mirror blew the suede elbows off their tweed jackets. They could not understand how a non-academic like Tuchman could sell so many books about something in which they were experts. She smelled of autodidact. Still worse, she was writing for people who were autodidacts and academics cannot abide the autodidact. Well, Tuchman was just a more entertaining writer than were the tweedy professors. She could write a narrative that thrilled the general public which galled them all the more. They attacked her from every angle except for one: not much of anything she wrote was wrong.
Tuchman had her faults, the biggest one being her compulsion to apply “the lessons of history” in some polemic way that irritates just about everybody. She can’t help herself. She does a poor job at applying the calamities of the 14th century to the 20th. Which is a GOOD thing in a way because we can read this sprawling and thorough work having been through a global pandemic and having witnessed all the societal fracturing inherent. Granted, bubonic plague is a snoodge more lethal than Winnie-poo Flu, but our pandemic was no slouch, especially with Tuchman’s Law at work on our smartphones and politicians. The Black Death itself faded in only a few years, but the depopulation, the warfare, and the religious and political disruptions affected Europe for decades. A cult of death manifested itself in the 14th Century among all classes of people and has done so again today. Read the book to find our what I mean.
A Distant Mirror chronicles the end of the Medieval era as we think we know it: chivalry, knights, castles, feudalism. These quickly gave way in that century to brigandage, class warfare, nation states and market economies (in Italy). Medieval times were pretty good up till then, they just ended badly, so we remember them as “dark.” For the most part, they were not. Oddly, the so-called Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment, choked itself out in a much bloodier fashion and yet we just think that was all Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
I mentioned Tuchman’s book, The Guns of August. It was considered a classic shortly after it was published in 1962. I think the book is inferior to A Distant Mirror. The much, much better book on the cassus belli of WWI is The Sleepwalkers, by Christopher Clark.
Clark is no Tuchman, however. His book is more scholarly, more detailed and much longer. Clark’s ability to keep the many personalities straight and coherent for the reader is admirable but his best efforts surpassed my abilities when I read it the first time. I found my comprehension problem frustrating, so I read it a second time. That sank into the swamp, so I read it a third time. That burned down, fell over then sank into the swamp. But the FOURTH time, it stuck. And that is what you are going to get lads and ladies, the strongest book on the outbreak of WWI ever written.
Clark’s thesis is this: WWI was not inevitable, it was not a consequence of unbounded nationalism, not a result of stultifying alliances or caused by blood-thirsty militarism or unstoppable mobilization schedules (all of which Tuchman cites in her book). The war was essentially an accident provoked by the biases and poor wisdom of numerous diplomats who had applied those same bromides before and somehow got away with it. The skills needed for great diplomatic triumphs like that of Bismark and Disraeli were assumed to be inheritable by their cocksure successors, but they were not and are not.
The Sleepwalkers is the book Kennedy’s Wiz Kids should have read, but alas, did not have. If they all read The Guns of August, it didn’t help them decide what to do in Vietnam.
The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s journalistic masterpiece, is essentially a set of biographies of the bright young men who took the nation to war in 1964. Sometimes derisively called the “Wiz Kids” they were Kennedy’s new generation of Groton-Harvard-Yale blue-blooded advisors. The title is not ironic, they really were brilliant men, America’s best and brightest. So good they were at knowing what would “wash” and what would not, they placed unlimited faith in themselves and the country. We were going to the moon, you know, and we were going to war with poverty and we were going to win.
These personalities came to power in 1960 and faced a resurgent Nikita Khrushchev who was certain the new, intellectual President was a wimp. He bullied and got the best of JFK in their first meeting. However, Kennedy and the Wiz Kids emerge victorious, they think, from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Confident their incremental use of force and diplomacy was triumphant over stumpy Soviet will, they carry on to the next crisis, Vietnam, and think the same incremental strategy will work on Ho Chi Minh.
The Wiz Kids quickly bung it up by provoking the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. Weeks later, Kennedy himself was assassinated orphaning the Wiz Kids to a new, fawning, step-father, Lyndon Johnson. LBJ loved them, they could do no wrong, unless they disagreed with him, didn’t do something he wanted or showed disloyalty. But other than that, they could do no wrong.
In such an environment, Johnson was never really faced with a dissenting or contrary view. Only once, belatedly, was Johnson confronted directly with a cogent, contrary argument AGAINST escalating the war (i.e. bombing North Vietnam). The single memorandum, written by George Ball, was prescient and damning. Ball was ignored.
Johnson’s deference to the expertise of the Wiz Kids was total, at least at first. Over time, cracks in their judgement began to appear. In the book’s introduction, Halberstam mentions a conversation between Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and President Johnson regarding the Wiz Kids:
“Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.
The toxic churn of Johnson’s indomitable will, his Great Society programs, his fear of being another Harry Truman (the guy who lost China), and the Wiz Kid’s hubris, led the country into a war designed to beguile America’s hawks long enough for Johnson’s re-election.
Of course, Halberstam was pegged by Kennedy himself as an “anti-war” journalist from his early days as a reporter in Vietnam. He gets in a few lefty digs here and there, but he pulls no punches on Kennedy or Johnson or anyone else for that matter. But whatever your feelings are about Vietnam, about our valor, our sacrifice, the fact remains that the country was manipulated into fighting a war so a Democrat wouldn’t look bad. The mandate Johnson received from his landslide 1964 victory was so clear he could (and did) force through huge domestic programs most of which we are still paying for today. Maybe we could have won the war or changed its course, but that is NOT what this book is about. The book is about how those bright young men came to their decisions and how a President deferred so slavishly to experts.
Imagine a whole White House full of Faucis and Murthys.
Time to start A Distant Mirror again.
Vale fratres et sorores
PS: H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty is a fine adjunct to Halberstam’s book.
I remember hearing that living through the Great Depression was not so bad: provided you had a job (which 75% of people did).
Great book recommendations! I remember an esteemed co-worker raving about “The Best and the Brightest” as well, so I will have to read it.