Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [3]
While the OWI in San Francisco broadcast America’s news to the Far East, our operations from New York were beamed to Europe. Because of my first-hand experience of Japan, such as it was, I was assigned to the Far East desk, whose task was to explain the Pacific war and the extent of the American effort in Asia to our European listeners. In the course of this duty I covered at second hand General Stilwell’s campaign in Burma, which remained in the back of my mind over the next twenty-odd years until it emerged as a book with Stilwell as the focus of the American experience in China.
Otherwise, I cannot remember writing anything of any great interest while at OWI except two “backgrounders,” as they were called, in anticipation of expected events. One was on the history and geography of the China coast in preparation for an American landing, and one was on the Soviet Far East for use when and if Russia entered the war against Japan. The desk editor, a newspaperman by training, grew very impatient with my work on these pieces. “Don’t look up so much material,” he said. “You can turn out the job much faster if you don’t know too much.” While this was doubtless true for a journalist working against a deadline, it was not advice that suited my temperament. In any event, at that point the war suddenly ended, and I do not know what became of my “backgrounders.” I would like to read them again, but any papers I may have retained from OWI days seem to have vanished.
Nothing appears in this collection from the 1940s nor until the last year of the ’50s, for the reason that after the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed, combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book. In 1948 I started work on my first book, Bible and Sword, which took six or seven years of very interrupted effort and quite a while longer to find a publisher. It was followed by The Zimmermann Telegram and then by “Perdicaris,” which, proving too slight for a book, was reduced to the short-story length that appears here.
From the 1960s on, the selections speak more or less for themselves. “The Citizen Versus the Military” represents something of an aberration as my only commencement address (except for one in 1967 at my daughter’s graduation from Radcliffe, which is not included). For general use, I have a firm rule against commencement speeches, because I have no idea what to tell the young people and no desire merely to fill a required occasion with generalities. In 1972, however, on receiving the invitation to speak at Williams, I felt I did have something specific that I wanted to say about what seemed to me the foolish and mindless squawking of the young against ROTC and military service. I believed the war in Vietnam to be unjustifiable, wicked, and unsuccessful besides, but for the civilian citizen to leave the dirty work to the military while holding himself distinct from and above them seemed to me irresponsible and not the best way for the coming generation to gain control of our military policies. If they wanted to control the officer corps, I suggested, they should join the ROTC and then strike. Distributed by a newspaper syndicate, this speech was widely reprinted, besides, as I later learned, causing an irate alumnus of Williams to file a complaint about me with the FBI.
Following the publication of Stilwell in 1971, I wrote a number of pieces on the American relationship to China and its echoes in Vietnam, but when the main theme has already been expressed in the book, reviving the ephemera serves no purpose. The exception is the Mao article (this page) which, as the first uncovering and report of this incident, is a piece of primary historical research of which I am rather proud. It was gratifyingly publicized by Foreign Affairs to mark their fiftieth-anniversary issue—and mark privately for me the awesome passage of thirty-six years since my first mousy penetration of their pages.
Two absences which