ON POLITICAL BOOKS

...Rational thought clearly counseled the Trojans to suspect a trick . . .The successive measures taken with regard both to the American colonies and to Vietnam were so plainly grounded in preconceived, fixed attitudes and so regularly contrary to common sense, rational inference and cogent advice that, as folly, they speak for themselves ." Well, great...

...they were...

...But reelection is on their minds, and that becomes the criterion As long as we have elected representatives, reelection is likely to be on their minds—just as revenge and greed and envy are likely to remain parts of the human makeup, no matter what the sermonizers say...

...There are several clues in the book...

...They must have been seen as unwise at the time, not merely in retrospect...

...With a few exceptions, which I will mention later, the history here is straightforward survey-course stuff, which develops no discernible argument...

...You have, of course, heard this wish before, from- someone other than Barbara Tuchman...

...Nor do the narratives offer much original information...

...By my count, the case-study sections are composed of 98 percent retelling of history and 2 percent exploration of the central theme...

...Can there be anyone in the reading public who does not know that John Kennedy came to office surrounded by war-hardened men whose brilliance led them to think they were more brilliant than James Fallows is Washington editor of The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...To me, each of these arguments is sensible enough...

...She calls stupidity "folly',' or more politely still, "pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest ." By that she means the refusal to change course even when—as for both the French and the Americans in Vietnam—the damage done by staying the course becomes obvious...

...But might not the ideological ferment and territorial ambitions in the colonies have made that loss inevitable at some point, even if the sound, conciliatory counsel of William Pitt had prevailed...

...Or that Adlai Stevenson was perceived as a weak sister, or that most of the crowd except Stevenson had never run for office, or that Maxwell Taylor was the beau ideal of the modern soldier/scholar, or that Walt Rostow was a brimming fount of can-do ideas...

...and it continues even though alternatives theoretically exist, in the form of negotiated disarmament...

...What is true of her character sketches is true of her policy analysis as well...

...For me, and I suspect, most readers, the section called "The Renaissance Popes Provoke the Protestant Secession" contained the most surprises...

...Knopf $18.95...

...As for Vietnam, she says that an alternative to folly was always available: the United States could have recognized that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist above all else and made an accommodation with him...

...We could use more reason in our government—and probably in our families, our schools, and our publishing industry too...

...but in "reason...

...In The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam built a novella.around the story of John McNaughton, a Harvard Law professor posted to the Pentagon who was torn between his acidly pessimistic view of the war policy and his desire to stay on the inside, to remain a player...

...Connecticut, chapter of Common Cause...

...Yet what she has to say about the subject is breathtakingly unenlightening...

...America Betrays Herself in Vietnam" is the longest section of the book and seems to be its emotional center...

...yes, the popes were blind to the damage their licentiousness did—without digging deeper for clues about why certain styles of government or types of men were more likely than others to succumb to these pathologies...

...But it may be hard to convey to anyone who has not read this book how little it contains beyond the recitation of facts, and therefore how disappointing the secondhandedness of the narrative section is...

...Never had there been more reasoned explanations of a policy than those advanced in the middle sixties for the Vietnam policy...

...Faithful readers of this magazine know that its contributors are no saints where McNaughton is concerned...

...The climax of his story involves a famous memorandum, in which McNaughton assessed America's reasons for being in Vietnam and concluded they were "70 percent to avoid a humiliating defeat to our reputation as guarantor!' Tuchman quotes that line, and in so doing signifies how much this chronicle is a warmedover version of others we have read before...

...But if such familiar tales are to be told again (in a setting other than a history course), they should serve some purpose, either adding to the reader's understanding of the event itself or acting as building blocks for some larger theme...

...The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam...

...By these standards, she selects three and a half case studies...

...I suspect that Barbara Tuchman stuck with the chronicles of folly—rather than an exploration of alternatives—because she was really more interested in the repeated patterns of misbehavior in goverments that failed...

...At the gross-anatomy level, the proportions of the book illustrate its difficulties...

...Nor about Chester Cooper: whenever the origins of the Vietnam policy come up, it is hard not to repeat, as I am doing here, Cooper's story of the advisers who screw up their courage to tell Lyndon Johnson that his policy is mistaken, take their places around the big table in the West Wing of the White House, and then hear themselves saying, when Johnson asks each in turn whether he has any complaints about the latest decision to escalate, "No, Mr...

...and their history must contain a path not taken, a sensible but overlooked alternative to the march of folly...

...It would not be fair to say that Tuchman makes no attempt at analysis...

...passages...

...Leaders customarily misjudge their adversaries—the Americans' failing to understand, for example, that the North Vietnamese would not give up simply because they lived under a rain of bombs...

...But nowhere in this thick book does she come close to answering the important question she originally posed...

...Britain's mishandling of colonial America's complaints, leading to the American Revolution...

...The large messages are, in brief, that the greed and decadence of the Renaissance popes destroyed the legitimacy of the Church...

...The task of creating better politics involves understanding the circumstances that bring out the best and- worst in our representatives...

...it finally appeared, as expected, in the middle of Tuchman's discussion of how Lyndon Johnson raised the stakes...

...But what does it tell us to say that men have sometimes lacked reason...

...I kept waiting-for the one anecdote that would symbolize how derivative the entire account was...

...The arms race, that is, represents a failure of reason...

...She makes almost no mention of another development that had much to do with the Reformation: the beginnings of a capitalist economy in northern Europe, which eroded many forms of feudal power, including that of the Church...

...It is typically 'expressed by older members of the good-government clubs, who view more -and more of what they see with alarm...

...The three major ones concern the decadence of the Renaissance popes, whose excesses (she says) provided the moral fuel for the Protestant Reformation...

...As with the popes and the American Revolution, she asserts that the self-destruction was preventable without pausing to argue her case...

...Governments find it extremely difficult to change a mistaken course, even as the casualites mount...

...She assigns a large moral to each episode and touches from time to time on several recurrent themes...

...in an accurate assessment of national interests, certainly...

...But what does that tell us...

...Isn't that precisely what Lyndon Johnson thought he was doing—although the history he had in mind was that of Munich, not of Dien Bien Phu...

...Retelling the parable of the Good Samaritan for moral instruction may make sense...

...She is right that the loss of America was a calamity for Britain...

...True, the boy had always been precocious, having become an abbot at age eight...

...and it depends on our understanding the circumstances in which nations and leaders can rise to their best...

...The reason they keep giving their sermons is that they know there is a difference between greed that is controlled and.greed given free rein;- the first leads to acceptable social life, the second to the world of Hobbes...

...This may seem like a simple-minded way to judge: obviously, certain kinds of historical narrative develop themes implicitly, without the author's having to sweat up special "what does it mean...

...They turned out to be wrong—their reason was mistaken—but they seemed to their exponents to represent reason in its purest form...

...It is-no solution at all to wish for a different, nobler race of Solomonic leaders...

...With the intellectual stage thus set, Tuchman is off on nearly 400 pages of historical narrative...

...I hadn't known that Pope Innocent VIII appointed a 14-year-old, Giovanni de Medici, to the Sacred College of Cardinals...

...The thread that connects the gullible Trojans with the imprisoned LBJ was their refusal to see reason...

...it is recognized as potentially disastrous even as it happens, not merely in retrospect (retrospect, of course, might turn out to be hypothetical in this case...

...offering it as fresh information does not...

...A Tuchman of the 21st century, looking back on our troubled times, would no doubt discern that the crowning folly of the late 20th century was the nuclear arms race...

...that the ruling class in Britain grievously misjudged the colonials' complaints and thoughtlessly took steps the Americans found intolerable...

...I am not trying to suggest that absolute novelty is necessary, or even always desirable as a literary trait...

...Tuchman offers no advice in 'that direction because she seems to' think it's a matter of- hoping for a better class of person in the government...

...in a tragic imagination, probably...

...They are not up to the temptations a democratic system presents: "Intelligent government would require that the persons entrusted with high, office should formulate and execute policy according to their best judgment, the best knowledge available, and' a judicious estimate of the lesser evil...

...She sprinkles mentions of several of these through the text...

...This, too, may seem unfair: beyond a certain point, how much new can be said about an event as well-chronicled as the American Revolution...

...To be sure, the McNaughton story is one of those anecdotes so powerful in its explanatory symbolism that only a saint could resist quoting it again and again...

...She did not write this way before...

...It is contrary to common sense for couples to get divorced, for children to be mistreated, for crime to occur, and for prejudice to persist...

...I agree with her, but if I didn't before I began reading I would have found nothing in the book to persuade me...

...That purpose, I believe, is related to the basic frame of mind with which she approaches this topic and, I would imagine, much of contemporary life...

...These portraits had some bite when David Halberstam presented them a dozen years ago, but not any longer, especially when they serve no larger argumentative purpose...

...Some of the material, especially the tales of debauched popes, is colorful in its own right...

...But Tuchman's accounts do not do so...

...I would guess that this was the event that provoked Tuchman to look into the origins of folly...

...they must have endured past the career of any one leader and have involved the failings of an entire group, not merely of an individual (this excludes lone monsters like Hitler...

...The most important is in the final few pages, an epilogue called "A Lantern on the Stern ." At the end of her historical inquiry, Tuchman reveals to us that "rejection of reason is the prime characteristic of folly...

...What does it mean about Bundy or McNamara or Rostow to say that they were deficient in reason...

...Similarly, in politics there is a difference between a reelection frenzy that eclipses all else (the Vance Hartke variety) and electoral ambition that occasionally bows to other values...

...From the original brushing-off of Ho Chi Minh's entreaties, through Kennedy's alleged intention to pull out of Vietnam—but not until after the 1964 election—to Lyndon Johnson's tragic escalation and Richard Nixon's attempt to ensure a "decent interval" between the American withdrawal and the collapse of Saigon, Barbara Tuchman tells a most familiar tale...

...The similarity is underscored by Tuchman's favorite term for misguided leadersoodenheaded:' a word that instantly evokes a meeting of the Sharon...

...What disappoints is that Tuchman does not bother to rebut the possible challenges to them...

...To put it another way, her purpose in this book seems to be to name the forms of misbehavior rather than to explain or understand them...

...I make no claim to having mastered the scholarship of the Vietnam era, but I found almost nothing in these pages I had not read before—most recently -in Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History, but also in any of a dozen other books as well...

...and that American officials made a stand "against communism" in Vietnam, where there was no true national interest and the odds were all against them...

...Each of these patterns is important, as readers of this magazine have been amply reminded over the years, but Tuchman is strangely reluctant to enlarge on or connect them...

...That is the tone of this book and it may say more about the author's autumn view than about the objects of her scrutiny...

...He also had good family connections, since apart from being a Medici he was the brother-in-law of the Pope's illegitimate son...

...Or that Robert McNamara was a demon for numbers, the very Brilliantine of his hairdo bespeaking a desire to reduce all human problems to neat, quantifiable formulations...

...The work of bringing different cultures to agreement, breaking mental stereotypes, and-convincing mutually suspicious powers , to give each other a chance is far more difficult than pointing out folly...

...Today's politicians are debased by greed for money and lust for power...

...In a few places, Tuchman displays the narrative skill that originally made her reputation...

...What does it mean to say, as Tuchman frequently does, that we should "learn from history...

...It depends, that is, on understanding "folly;' not• simply identifying it as a sort of original sin...

...Britain Loses America;' which dwells on the personal strengths and failings of William Pitt, Lord North, and Edmund Burke, is well-told but does little to inform anyone already acquainted with the basic story line...

...In a sense of proportion, perhaps...

...among the reasons is that the information that works its way to a pope, prince, or president tends to reflect the things he wants to hear...

...She mentions them in passing as they come up—see, the British were too lazy to understand the Americans' motivations...

...It meets all the criteria: it has persisted from one generation of leaders to another...

...The half-study is a brief, introductory discussion of what Tuchman calls the prototype of folly—the Trojans' decision to let the wooden horse, packed with Greek soldiers, inside their walls...

...In the first pages of her book she proposes to study episodes that meet three tests...

...Lure of office, known in our country as Potomac fever, stultifies a better performance of government...

...and the United States' intervention in Vietnam...

...How can I speak of a frame of mind...

...President .") But there is a difference between drawing on a canon of bureaucratic history to establish a point and simply floating out the old stories as if their content were news...