Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [1]
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 consoeur” (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