Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [167]
Proving his manhood was, I imagine, a factor pushing President Nasser of Egypt into provoking war with Israel in 1967 so that he could not be accused of weakness or appear less militant than the Syrians. One senses it as a factor in the personalities of Johnson and Nixon in regard to withdrawing from Vietnam; there was that horrid doubt, “Shall I look soft?” It was clearly present in Kennedy too; on the other hand, it does not seem to have bothered Eisenhower, Truman, or FDR.
A classic case of man’s temperament obscuring the evidence is brought out by John Davies in his recent book, Dragon by the Tail. Stalin’s greatest error, he points out, was to underestimate Chinese Communism. “He was deceived by his own cynicism. He did not think Mao could make it because, astonishingly enough, of his own too little faith in the power of a people’s war.”
Of all the barriers that reports from the field must beat against, the most impenetrable is the disbelief of policy-makers in what they do not want to believe. All the evidence of a German right-wing thrust obtained by the French General Staff in the years immediately preceding 1914, including authentic documents sold to them by a German officer, could not divert them from their own fatal plan of attack through the center or persuade them to prepare a defense on their left. In 1941 when the double agent Richard Sorge in Tokyo reported to Moscow the exact dates of the coming German invasion, his warning was ignored because the Russians’ very fear of this event caused them not to believe it. It was filed under “doubtful and misleading information.” The same principle dominated Washington’s reception of the reports from China in the 1940s. No matter how much evidence was reported indicating that the collapse of the Kuomintang was only a matter of time, nothing could induce Washington to loosen the connection tying us to Chiang Kai-shek nor rouse the policy-makers from what John Service then called an “indolent short-term expediency.”
National myths are another obstacle in the way of realism. The American instinct of activism, the “can do” myth, has lately led us into evil that was not necessary and has blotted the American record beyond the power of time to whiten. Stewart Alsop made the interesting point Sunday [January 28] in the New York Times Book Review that American Presidents since Roosevelt have disliked the State Department and leaned heavily on the military because the military tend to be brisk, can-do problem-solvers while senior Foreign Service officers tend to be “skeptical examiners of the difficulties”; and worried uncertain Presidents will prefer positive to negative advice. You will notice that this reliance on military advice coincides with the era of air power and has much to do, I think, with the enormous attraction of the easy solution—the idea that a horrid problem can be solved by fiat from the air, without contact, without getting mixed up in a long dirty business on the ground. The influence of air power on foreign policy would make an interesting study.
Activism in the past, the impulse to improve a bad situation, to seek a better land, to move on to a new frontier, has been a great force, the great force, in our history, with positive results when it operates in a sphere we can control. In Asia that is not the case, and the result has been disaster. Disregarding local realities and depth of motivation, disregarding such a lesson as Dien Bien Phu, we feel impelled to take action rather than stay out of trouble. It would help if we could learn occasionally to let things seek an indigenous solution.
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith. We now discover happily