Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [2]
On returning to America, I tried to express something of what I had learned and thought about the Japanese in the little piece reprinted here. I do not remember when or how it was submitted to so august a journal as Foreign Affairs, but suddenly there I was in print, a novice of twenty-four, among the foreign ministers and opinion-makers and, more important, making the acquaintance of a wise and fine man, the editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong.
Meantime, in 1936, I went to work for the Nation, which my father, Maurice Wertheim, a banker of rather eclectic interests, had bought from Oswald Garrison Villard to save it from bankruptcy. Freda Kirchwey, Villard’s successor as editor and a friend of my parents, was left in control, along with a new colleague, Max Lerner. My job at first was to clip and file a far-flung variety of newspapers and periodicals, and gradually to write some of the two hundred-word paragraphs on current events which appeared each week on the Nation’s opening pages. Writing on assigned subjects one knew nothing about—recidivism, migrant labor, the death of Georges Chicherin, TVA, AAA, the Nye Munitions Committee, the Montreux Straits Convention, the Nazi Party Congress—one had to collect the relevant facts, condense the subject in two hundred words incorporating the Nation’s point of view, and have it ready on time. The experience was invaluable, even if the pieces were ephemeral.
Accredited by the Nation, I went to Valencia and Madrid during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, and afterward stayed on in Europe, caught up in the frenzy of activities against Non-intervention and appeasement and what was called by the other side “premature anti-fascism.” It was a somber, exciting, believing, betraying time, with heroes, hopes, and illusions. I have always felt that the year and decade of reaching one’s majority, rather than of one’s birth, is the stamp one bears. I think of myself as a child of the ’30s. I was a believer then, as I suppose people in their twenties must be (or were, in my generation). I believed that the right and the rational would win in the end. In London I put together a little book entitled The Lost British Policy, designed to show how it had always been a cardinal principal of British foreign policy to keep Spain (and the gates to the Mediterranean) free of control by the dominant power on the continent (currently Hitler). It was a respectable piece of research but, as a reviewer said, “tendentious.” I worked also for a weekly information bulletin called the War in Spain, subsidized by the Spanish government, but I have kept no files of my contributions.
About the time of Munich I came home and continued to engage in Spanish affairs and in compiling a chronological record of the origins of the war in collaboration with Jay Allen, the most knowledgeable of American correspondents on Spain. With the defeat of the Republic in 1939 I met the event that cracked my heart, politically speaking, and replaced my illusions with recognition of realpolitik; it was the beginning of adulthood. I wrote a threnody on the role of the Western nations in the Spanish outcome, called “We Saw Democracy Fail,” for the New Republic, but as one of the pieces that embarrass me thirty-odd years later, it has not been included.
On June 18, 1940, the day Hitler entered Paris, I was married to Dr. Lester R. Tuchman, a physician of New York, who not unreasonably felt at that time that the world was too unpromising to bring children into. Sensible for once, I argued that if we waited for the outlook to improve, we might wait forever, and that if we wanted a child at all we should have it now, regardless of Hitler. The tyranny of men not being quite as total as today’s feminists would have us believe, our first daughter was born nine months later. After Pearl Harbor and my husband’s joining the Medical Corps, the baby and I followed him to Camp Rucker in Alabama, and when he went overseas with his hospital early in 1943, we came home and I went to work