The March of Folly

by Barbara Tuchman

  A second folly was illusion of omnipotence, cousin to the Popes’ illusion of invulnerability; a third was wooden-headedness and “cognitive dissonance”; a fourth was “working the levers” as a substitute for thinking.

  In the illusion of omnipotence, American policy-makers took it for granted that on a given aim, especially in Asia, American will could be made to prevail. This assumption came from the can-do character of a self-created nation and from the sense of competence and superpower derived from World War II. If this was “arrogance of power,” in Senator Fulbright’s phrase, it was not so much the fatal hubris and overextension that defeated Athens and Napoleon, and in the 20th century Germany and Japan, as it was failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill. “Nation-building” was the most presumptuous of the illusions. Settlers of the North American continent had built a nation from Plymouth Rock to Valley Forge to the fulfilled frontier, yet failed to learn from their success that elsewhere, too, only the inhabitants can make the process work.

  Wooden-headedness, the “Don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts” habit, is a universal folly never more conspicuous than at upper levels of Washington with respect to Vietnam. Its grossest fault was underestimation of North Vietnam’s commitment to its goal. Enemy motivation was a missing element in American calculations, and Washington could therefore ignore all the evidence of nationalist fervor and of the passion for independence which as early as 1945 Hanoi had declared “no human force can any longer restrain.” Washington could ignore General Leclerc’s prediction that conquest would take half a million men and “Even then it could not be done.” It could ignore the demonstration of élan and capacity that won victory over a French army with modern weapons at Dien Bien Phu, and all the continuing evidence thereafter.

  American refusal to take the enemy’s grim will and capacity into account has been explained by those responsible on the ground of ignorance of Vietnam’s history, traditions and national character: there were “no experts available,” in the words of one high-ranking official. But the longevity of Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule could have been learned from any history book on Indochina. Attentive consultation with French administrators whose official lives had been spent in Vietnam would have made up for the lack of American expertise. Even superficial American acquaintance with the area, when it began to supply reports, provided creditable information. Not ignorance, but refusal to credit the evidence and, more fundamentally, refusal to grant stature and fixed purpose to a “fourth-rate” Asiatic country were the determining factors, much as in the case of the British attitude toward the American colonies. The irony of history is inexorable.

  Underestimation was matched by overestimation of South Vietnam because it was the beneficiary of American assistance, and because Washington verbiage equated any non-Communist group with the “free” nations, fostering the delusion that its people were prepared to fight for their “freedom” with the will and energy that freedom is supposed to inspire. Such was the stated anchor of our policy; dissonant evidence had to be rejected or it would have made it obvious that this policy was built on sand. When dissonance disturbed attitudes toward either enemy or client, the attitudes, following the rules of wooden-headedness, rigidified.

  A last folly was the absence of reflective thought about the nature of what we were doing, about effectiveness in relation to the object sought, about balance of possible gain as against loss and against harm both to the ally and to the United States. Absence of intelligent thinking in rulership is another of the universals, and raises the question whether in modern states there is something about political and bureaucractic life that subdues the functioning of intellect in favor of “working the levers” without regard to rational expectations. This would seem to be an ongoing prospect.

  The longest war had come to an end. Faintly from a distance of 200 years might have been heard Chatham’s summary of a nation’s self-betrayal: “by the arts of imposition, by its own credulity, through the means of false hope, false pride and promised advantages of the most romantic and improbable nature.” A contemporary summing up was voiced by a Congressman from Michigan, Donald Riegle. In talking to a couple from his constituency who had lost a son in Vietnam, he faced the stark recognition that he could find no words to justify the boy’s death. “There was no way I could say that what had happened was in their interest or in the national interest or in anyone’s interest.”

  * Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Theater Commander, reported on 2 October 1945 to the Combined Chiefs of Staff that the only way he could avoid involving British/Indian forces was “to continue using the Japanese for maintaining law and order and this means I can not begin to disarm them for another three months.”

  * Radford had in mind, it has been said, provoking a Chinese military response in order to precipitate a war with the United States before China was strong enough to threaten American security. His suggested use of A-weapons in Indochina was submitted orally by the Admiral’s assistant to General Douglas MacArthur, then acting as Counselor to the Defense Department, who firmly discouraged the idea. “If we approached the French,” he wrote to Dulles, “the story would certainly leak … and cause a great hue and cry throughout the parliaments of the free world,” particularly among the NATO allies, especially Britain. America would then be pressured to give assurances that she would not use A-weapons in the future without consultation. Furthermore, Soviet propaganda would portray “our desire to use such weapons in Indochina as proof of the fact we were testing out weapons on native peoples.” According to an attached note by one of Dulles’ staff, “Sec did not want to raise this now with Adm. R—and the latter I gather did not raise it with Sec.”

  * Previously cited in two scholarly works (see Reference Notes), this statement, which Mr. McNamara does not recall, has defied all efforts to trace it to a documented primary source. It is included here because the ring is authentic and the implications serious, then and now.

  Epilogue

  “A LANTERN ON THE STERN”

  If pursuing disadvantage after the disadvantage has become obvious is irrational, then rejection of reason is the prime characteristic of folly. According to the Stoics, reason was the “thinking fire” that directs the affairs of the world, and the emperor or ruler of the state was considered to be “the servant of divine reason [appointed] to maintain order on earth.” The theory was comforting, but then as now “divine reason” was more often than not overpowered by non-rational human frailties—ambition, anxiety, status-seeking, face-saving, illusions, self-delusions, fixed prejudices. Although the structure of human thought is based on logical procedure from premise to conclusion, it is not proof against the frailties and the passions.

  Rational thought clearly counseled the Trojans to suspect a trick when they woke to find the entire Greek army had vanished, leaving only a strange and monstrous prodigy beneath their walls. Rational procedure would have been, at the least, to test the Horse for concealed enemies as they were urgently advised to do by Capys the Elder, Laocoon and Cassandra. That alternative was present and available yet discarded in favor of self-destruction.

  In the case of the Popes, reason was perhaps less accessible. They were so imbued by the rampant greed and grab and uninhibited self-gratification of their time that a rational response to the needs of their constituency was almost beyond their scope. It would have required a culture of different values. One might suppose that an ordinary instinct of self-preservation would have taken notice of the rising dissatisfaction lapping like flood water at their feet, but their view of the Papacy was temporal and secular, and they were too immersed in princely wars and in private consumption and display to take alarm at the intangible of discontent. The Papacy’s folly lay not so much in being irrational as in being totally estranged from its appointed task.

  The successive measures taken with regard both t
o the American colonies and to Vietnam were so plainly grounded in preconceived fixed attitudes and so regularly contrary to common sense, rational inference and cogent advice that, as folly, they speak for themselves.

  In the operations of government, the impotence of reason is serious because it affects everything within reach—citizens, society, civilization. It was a problem of deep concern to the Greek founders of Western thought. Euripides, in his last plays, conceded that the mystery of moral evil and of folly could no longer be explained by external cause, by the bite of Atē, as if by a spider, or by other intervention of the gods. Men and women had to confront it as part of their being. His Medea knows herself to be controlled by passion “stronger than my purposes.” Plato, some fifty years later, desperately wanted man to grasp and never let go of the “sacred golden cord of reason,” but ultimately he too had to acknowledge that his fellow-beings were anchored in the life of feelings, jerked like puppets by the strings of desires and fears that made them dance. When desire disagrees with the judgment of reason, he said, there is a disease of the soul, “And when the soul is opposed to knowledge, or opinion or reason which are her natural laws, that I call folly.”

  When it came to government, Plato assumed that a wise ruler would take most care of what he loved most, that is, what fitted best with his own interests, which would be equivalent to the best interests of the state. Since he was not confident that the rule always operated the way it should, Plato advised as a cautionary procedure that the future guardians of the state should be watched and tested during their period of maturing to ensure that they conducted themselves according to the rule.

  With the advent of Christianity, personal responsibility was given back to the external and supernatural, at the command of God and the Devil. Reason returned for a brief brilliant reign in the 18th century, since when Freud has brought us back to Euripides and the controlling power of the dark, buried forces of the soul, which not being subject to the mind are incorrigible by good intentions or rational will.

  Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise. Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the very top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office. Other occupations—sports, sciences, the professions and the creative and performing arts—offer various satisfactions but not the opportunity for power. They may appeal to status-seekers and, in the form of celebrity, offer crowd worship and limousines and prizes, but these are the trappings of power, not the essence. Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others—only to lose it over themselves.

  Thomas Jefferson, who held more and higher offices than most men, took the sourest view of it. “Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on [office],” he wrote to a friend, “a rottenness begins in his conduct.” His contemporary across the Atlantic, Adam Smith, was if anything more censorious. “And thus Place … is the end of half the labors of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world.” Both were speaking of moral failure, not of competence. When that comes into question, it gains no higher rating from other statesmen. In the 1930s, when a chairman was being sought for the Senate investigation of the munitions industry, a leader of the peace movement asked the advice of Senator George Norris. Ruling himself out as too old, Norris went down the list of his colleagues, crossing off one after the other as too lazy, too stupid, too close to the Army, as moral cowards or overworked or in poor health or having conflict of interest or facing re-election. When he had finished he had eliminated all but Senator Gerald Nye, the only one out of the 96 whom he deemed to have the competence, independence and stature for the task. Much the same opinion in different circumstances was pronounced by General Eisenhower in discussing the need for inspired leaders to create a United States of Europe as the only way to preserve Europe’s security. He did not think it would happen, because “Everyone is too cautious, too fearful, too lazy, and too ambitious (personally).” Odd and notable is the appearance of lazy in both catalogues.

  A greater inducement to folly is excess of power. After he had conceived his wonderful vision of philosopher-kings in the Republic, Plato began to have doubts and reached the conclusion that laws were the only safeguard. Too much power given to anything, like too large a sail on a vessel, he believed, is dangerous; moderation is overthrown. Excess leads on the one hand to disorder and on the other to injustice. No soul of man is able to resist the temptation of arbitrary power, and there is “No one who will not under such circumstances become filled with folly, the worst of diseases.” His kingdom will be undermined and “all his power will vanish from him.” Such indeed was the fate that overtook the Renaissance Papacy to the point of half, if not all, of its power; and Louis XIV, although not until after his death; and—if we consider the American Presidency to confer excess of power—Lyndon Johnson, who was given to speaking of “my air force” and thought his position entitled him to lie and deceive; and, most obviously, Richard Nixon.

  Mental standstill or stagnation—the maintenance intact by rulers and policy-makers of the ideas they started with—is fertile ground for folly. Montezuma is a fatal and tragic example. Leaders in government, on the authority of Henry Kissinger, do not learn beyond the convictions they bring with them; these are “the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they are in office.” Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced. Why did American experience of supporting the unpopular party in China supply no analogy to Vietnam? And the experience of Vietnam none for Iran? And why has none of the above conveyed any inference to preserve the present government of the United States from imbecility in El Salvador? “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!” lamented Samuel Coleridge. “But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.” The image is beautiful but the message misleading, for the light on the waves we have passed through should enable us to infer the nature of the waves ahead.

  In its first stage, mental standstill fixes the principles and boundaries governing a political problem. In the second stage, when dissonances and failing function begin to appear, the initial principles rigidify. This is the period when, if wisdom were operative, re-examination and re-thinking and a change of course are possible, but they are rare as rubies in a backyard. Rigidifying leads to increase of investment and the need to protect egos; policy founded upon error multiplies, never retreats. The greater the investment and the more involved in it the sponsor’s ego, the more unacceptable is disengagement. In the third stage, pursuit of failure enlarges the damages until it causes the fall of Troy, the defection from the Papacy, the loss of a trans-Atlantic empire, the classic humiliation in Vietnam.

  Persistence in error is the problem. Practitioners of government continue down the wrong road as if in thrall to some Merlin with magic power to direct their steps. There are Merlins in early literature to explain human aberration, but freedom of choice does exist—unless we accept the Freudian unconscious as the new Merlin. Rulers will justify a bad or wrong decision on the ground, as a historian and partisan wrote of John F. Kennedy, that “He had no choice,” but no matter how equal two alternatives may appear, there is always freedom of choice to change or desist from a counter-productive course if the policy-maker has the moral courage to exercise it. He is not a fated creature blown by the whims of Homeric gods. Yet to recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course, is the most repugnant option in government.

  For a chief of state, admitting error is almost out of the question. The American misfortune during the Vietnam period was to have had Presidents who lacked the self-confidence for the grand withdrawal. We co
me back again to Burke: “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great Empire and little minds go ill together.” The test comes in recognizing when persistence in error has become self-damaging. A prince, says Machiavelli, ought always to be a great asker and a patient hearer of truth about those things of which he has inquired, and he should be angry if he finds that anyone has scruples about telling him the truth. What government needs is great askers.

  Refusal to draw inference from negative signs, which under the rubric “wooden-headedness” has played so large a part in these pages, was recognized in the most pessimistic work of modern times, George Orwell’s 1984, as what the author called “Crimestop.” “Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments … and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

  The question is whether or how a country can protect itself from protective stupidity in policy-making, which in turn raises the question whether it is possible to educate for government. Plato’s scheme, which included breeding as well as educating, was never tried. A conspicuous attempt by another culture, the training of the mandarins of China for administrative function, produced no very superior result. The mandarins had to pass through years of study and apprenticeship and weeding out by a series of stiff examinations, but the successful ones did not prove immune to corruption and incompetence. In the end they petered out in decadence and ineffectiveness.