Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August: A Crucial Read for Government Leaders Today

THROWBACK THURSDAY

The current horrors in Israel/Gaza left me speechless here for a number of days. Today I felt that this 2009 blog post had something important to say. 

Display of 1962 Soviet Missile in Havana

I wrote this in 2009 while listening to an audio biography of Robert Kennedy by Evan Thomas. I felt inspired to share these thoughts when I reached the chapter dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis. RFK later published a book based on his memoirs during this crisis called 13 Days, which led to a pretty good film by the same name.

13 Days is about a critical moment in the Cold War. Robert Kennedy was Attorney General at the time, with his older brother John serving as President. The adversary during this critical juncture in history was Nikita Kruschev. When it was discovered that the Soviets had begun setting up nuclear missiles in Cuba, the president and his team of advisers had to determine what course of action to take.

It was decided that the president would go about “business as usual” so as to not alarm the press or the public, while his brother RFK led the brain trust that would work out scenarios and a path of action. Amongst this inner circle were Adlai Stevenson, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, and trusted friend/aide Kenny O’Donnell.

Several important events preceded the crisis: the Bay of Pigs debacle; the building of the Berlin Wall the previous year, which revealed the nature of their adversary; the riots in Oxford Town several weeks previous when James Meredith was to be enrolled at Ole Miss, which showed Bobby how inept and unprepared the military was for a crisis; and the January publication of Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, which spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and which both JFK and RFK had read. This is a book that changed history.

The insights from Tuchman’s tome had a riveting effect on RFK when the brainstorming began and he perceived how hawkish men like Dean Rusk and the others were. In evaluating courses of action, Berlin was not a city with free people inhabiting it, but rather a bargaining chip. What’s worse, the Pentagon agreed that it was highly unlikely a pre-emptive strike would take out every missile silo in Cuba, so we would most likely lose at least one and maybe more major U.S. cities.

Tuchman’s book, primarily a description of the first weeks of World War I, was the wakeup call. Tuchman showed how the drums of war create their own momentum. Because of this book Bobby was probably the first to understand that military action very likely could lead to World War III, something no one in a nuclear age could ever hope for. And as a result, the brothers dug in their heels against being drawn down that slippery slope by overly-confident military exuberance.

As an aside I thought the following anecdote from the RFK biography was amusing. The magnitude of the resistance to the integration of the University of Mississippi had an unsettling effect on RFK. The violent clash at Ole Miss left two dead including a French journalist covering the story for a London paper. 48 soldiers and 28 U.S. Marshalls were wounded by gunfire. When a few weeks later he learned that there were nuclear warheads in Cuba aimed at the United States, the younger Kennedy quipped, “Think they could hit Oxford?”

This morning I want to thank God for Barbara Tuchman and her efforts to put down in lines the insights she’d gained from her dedicated research. This incident is living proof of the power of the written word. It is not a stretch to imagine that her book saved many lives, if not the world.

The Fighting Never Ends

"I don't think this is a very bright page in American history." ~ Robert Kennedy

I've been reading a biography of James K. Polk called... Polk. He's not someone the average citizen really knows much about, despite being a U.S. president. He pretty much gets lumped in with a host of other unknowns like Harrison, Tyler, Taylor and everyone's favorite unknown Millard Fillmore.

Polk really did make some significant moves, nearly doubling the size of the United States through aggressive negotiations with England to take Oregon and a dubious war with Mexico to secure Texas to California. The book is loaded with anecdotes and details which I certainly have no space for, but the net net is this: Polk, the book, is a worthy read.

In my junior year in high school we had a great set of team teachers who provided a more complex view of U.S. history than we'd previously encountered. Our studies of the Mexican war were especially interesting, told from the point of view of Mexico. It wasn't pretty. Especially when the philosophical underpinnings were melded with the religious notion of Manifest Destiny. It is God's will that we steal these lands, because we will put them to better use than they can.

As the war drums began to sound, a homely looking skinny representative from Illinois stood up in Congress and called the president on the carpet saying this war had no right to be. Mr. Lincoln's arguments failed to win the day, and the war was carried to its ignominious conclusion.

Like many wars, the Mexican war continued to be "fought" long after the bullets stopped flying, hence Bobby Kennedy's comment during a trip to Indonesia in 1962. Upon hearing this remark, Vice President Lyndon Johnson released his own volley of venom, defending the history books by calling our Texas land grab "a bright page indeed."

Ironically, the former Texas senator helped immerse us in yet another controversial war, this one in Southeast Asia, a war that nearly split the country. More than forty years later, this war too is being debated, its motivations and costs and value heavily examined and re-interpreted. Unpopular war, yes. Yet many still defend its ends, despite the manner in which it was executed.

The 21st century introduced yet another controversial war. Just last week I saw an article saying this war, maligned as it is, will look different fifty to a hundred years from now. I do not wish to comment on that. My only comment here is that I'm willing to guess that fifty to one hundred years from now, we will still not have consensus, and somewhere someone will be arguing about it with someone else who disagrees with them.

Oh well...

One more trivial piece I learned from this biography about our second president from Tennessee. He was a slave owner. Almost immediately after leaving office he died, probably from the stress of this demanding occupation. In his will he freed his slaves... which would go into effect when his wife passed away. Unfortunately for the slaves, his wife lived 42 more years. Fortunately for the slaves, that skinny fellow from Illinois became president in twelve years, and declared those slaves free men in 15. Such are the twists and turns of history.

1968: A Very Dark Year

Just watched Tom Brokaw’s “1968” this week and it was quite thought provoking. David Hinckley’s review of the same gets it right, though. Hinckley, of the NYTimes, noted that "1968 doesn't lack integrity, interest or insight. It just stops short of exploring the questions that could move the chains from where the discussion left off a few years ago when media attention started shifting from the '60s to the '70s and '80s.”

The biggest insight of the program for me, which aired on the History Channel and is now available in DVD, came in the first two minutes or less. There was a draft in 1968, and the unpopular war mattered to everyone in every part of the country because, well, we were all potentially eligible to go, or our friends and brothers were on the line. It was a very different time. It was not so easy to disregard what was happening. "Something's happening here" affected all of us.

Today’s war is nonesuch. Sure, it has an impact on some people somewhere, but young people can get lost in their video games and iPods and beer parties and online social networks without once encountering a direct hit with someone whose life is actually touched by it all. And the rest can be lulled to sleep by the television shows, movies, sports, fishing, and other assorted distractions.

Add to the war the racial tensions, all sublimated today by comparison. Men like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King took bullets for a dream, which vaporized to some extent. Cities burned, but it was the ghetto homes that were destroyed and charred, and white America pretty much escaped unscathed.

Brokaw’s 1968 ended with NASA’s year-end achievement showing astronauts circumnavigating the moon, but it was not an event that mesmerized like the 1969 moonwalk, and it hardly addressed the real questions that flummoxed this nation.

My guess is that historians will continue arguing about the meaning of 1968 till the day it’s forgotten altogether. One thing is certain, there was a lot of anxiety going down. And whatever story you’ve heard about any facet of the sixties undoubtedly has another side, and another, and another. Every picture tells a story, don’t it?