Bill Moyers Journal; 109; An interview with Barbara Tuchman

. . . . . . Good evening, I'm Bill Moyers.

In the course of keeping a journal like this, you find yourself taking a kind of personal inventory of the nation's human resources. One week it may be the quiet loyalty a father in Tennessee gives to the memory of his son who died in Vietnam 11 years ago. The next week it may be an account of a young Chicano boxer who's struggling to get out of the ghettos of Los Angeles with his fist, struggling to overcome the barriers of poverty, neglect, and prejudice. Then there's another kind of national resource, a bank of talent, imagination, and intelligence that transcends a given place or a given time. This is the resource of gifted extraordinary people who understand the conditions of our times. In the next few weeks I'm going to be talking with some of these special people beginning tonight with the American historian Barbara Tuckman. . Barbara Tuckman was born into the distinguished Morgan Thaw family whose offspring have included diplomats, cabinet officers, noted businessmen, and lawyers.

Ever since she attended the World Economic Conference in London in 1933, she's been out in the world. As a correspondent doing the Spanish Civil War, a reporter in the Far East, a writer in London in New York, and more recently and historian of the first reign. In 1963 she won the Pulitzer Prize for the Guns of August, a best-selling history of the beginning phases of World War I. Then came the proud tower, a look at the world before the Great War, and another best-selling book of the month's selection. Her latest book, Still Well in the American Experience in China, was another triumph, winning her another Pulitzer Prize. Billing on her long interest in the Far East, Mrs. Tuckman tells the story of three decades of Sino-American relations, including those years of war and diplomacy, which shaped the modern world. We talked about such things in Mrs. Tuckman's apartment in New York. Did you get the feeling that you were being manipulated in a sense for their purpose?

Well, I think the whole relationship of the Chinese toward the new relationship of the Chinese toward the U.S. and other Western countries is, of course, one of, from their point of view, a manipulation. But so are we manipulating, you know, when we establish the Marshall doctor in Ornato, or when Nixon goes to China, it's for our purposes, isn't it? It's a form of manipulation. What do you think they have to gain, principally, from the fall in relations, from Mr. Nixon's visit, from they taught with the United States? Oh, I think what they're after, what they're gaining, is pressure against Russia, at least if not pressure, a support for them in their fear of the Russians. I think this triangular development that has superseded the old idea that we were against this communist monolith made up of Russia and China is the most important, really, the determining factor in this third quarter of the 20th century. As an historian, you must have been more than slightly bemused by the presence of Mr. Nixon the Arch anti-communist in the living room of Mao Zitong.

That picture, when we saw that picture of President Nixon and Mao sitting together with that wary look in those two chairs, eyeing each other, it was beyond belief, to me, just when I think of the anti-communist fanaticism of so much of our government and political people. People in the last, what is it, 35 years, of which, of course, Mr. Nixon started his career as an example of that, to see him sitting down with Chairman Mao, the great representative, really, of communism of our age, had an irony that was really quite sharp.

How do you think history will reconcile the contradiction between 10 years ago or today? Well, I think it will be recognized as it really already is that both sides were doing it for their own purposes, for very, very important purposes. Certainly, the Chinese needed us at this point very, I won't say desperately, but close to that. I was very much struck when I was in China by the general hatred and fear of Russia that is expressed everywhere. All the posters of the great red hero soldier, I do this because they're always shown with a fist, it was noticeable that they always wore fur caps. You never think of a Chinese in the fur cap, you know, with the ear flaps flapping in the breeze, showed how bravely they carelessly they weren't tied. And I kept wondering about this until I realized that it indicated where they thought the next war was going to be fought, where the red hero, the people's liberation army soldier,

was going to be fighting in the North. I suspect anyhow, this is the reason why they were always being shown in heavy coats and fur caps. The Henry Kissinger goes off to Paris this week to renew the peace talks. I'm intrigued by the eerie similarities between what we were doing in China and World War II and what we're doing now in Vietnam, trying to get a coalition government, trying to keep in office a very strong will to President-like two or Chinese. Are you beguile by those similarities? Well, beguile is to gentle a word, perhaps. I think one I, in a sense, one should say horrify because it's so dismayed. It's so depressing. Clearly, the tragic and destructive era we made in the overlong support of Junkai Shake. Long after everybody in our foreign service who knew who was there to report on what they saw and what they, how they judged conditions and what the facts were.

Long after all the information was in on the decay and corruption and ineptness or worse, I should say, the year. The total inability of this government to take hold of its country and make anything of it and it's lack of popular support. All this was known, but the Junkai Shake's reputation, of course, was so tremendous and we had been hearing for so long that he was the only man who could keep China together and we so feared a civil war in China. But didn't as in the case of President-to-we give him a far greater impression of his own strength than was warranted and as a result make him more intransigent in refusing. Yes, I think that's right. I think that's just what we do at Junkai Shake too. Exactly the same, which is why this pursuit of the continuance of the Vietnam War seems to me kind of thing that history will never forgive.

Because we know better, even this was the thing that made me so uncomfortable when the Pentagon papers were published and one could clearly see the people who were advising us to do things didn't even believe themselves that it would be successful. Well, you said in one of your books that we prolong the civil war in China by supporting too long the certain loser while antagonizing the inevitable winner. Right. Do you think that's happening in Indochina? Well, you know, I don't know as much about Indochina and the strength of the North as to make a definitive statement here. To gather, certainly that we have permanently antagonized if not the inevitable winner, certainly an inevitable permanent part of that country.

This is not a success for foreign policy. Foreign policies, I see it, is the exercise of influence for the enlightened self-interest of the country exercising the influence. In other words, what we should be doing is exercising our influence to our own benefit. And you pointed out that in China we achieved exactly the opposite outcome of what we wanted. As you look at it as a journalist more than a historian at the moment, is that a likely possibility in Vietnam? Well, I think it's not only a possibility, it's already happened because what we have achieved is what we have made or prolonged or kept going is a terribly destructive civil war which could not possibly have been kept going without our intervention. And which has made the thing that I mind, although I feel every human being's compassion for the Vietnamese, what I mind most about it is perhaps the terrible effect it had on American.

First and saddest, I think, is that it's made Americans hated abroad and thoughtful Americans at home ashamed. And the other thing it's done is of course to not only divide our society, but hold back, hold us back from doing the things we ought to be doing to put our own country in a better condition. If we reached in China exactly the opposite of what our object had been, what do you think our aim in China should have been? Well, I think it should have been to so conduct ourselves that we could maintain a good relationship that is a functioning relationship with whatever side became the government or whatever group became the government of China because that's the purpose of conducting foreign policy.

To stay in a non, I won't say friendly, but at least non-beligerent and reasonably communicative relationship with one's fellow countries, especially one as large and important and crucial to the world as China. In 1945, Joe and Lionel Mao Zitong seemed ready to join in a coalition government or at least a coalition apparatus with Chen Kai-shek. And he turned it down in Toto. Why? Zhang? Zhang, yes. Well, I think that he felt that to admit, as he said to Hurley at one point, to admit the Chinese to the government on terms that they would come in on would mean that they would take over because he recognized, I suppose, that they were more dynamic, that is they had the future was on their side.

That sounds terribly correct. That's the terrible thing about it. That the same thing is now the situation in Vietnam. And I don't think that a coalition government makes anybody with any common sense would know that two parties to a terrible war are not fighting in order to come to an agreement with each other. They are irreconcilable. So that brings me right back to Paris because you said somewhere that quarrels about which nations go to war just cannot be negotiated. Well, I believe that.

Of course, there have been negotiated settlements, but usually Korea was because both sides were about evenly hurting, and that's very rare. And nothing to gain. But the North Vietnam has been fighting for its independence since the French were there. And this is a very long and a very old and a very profound struggle which America is not going to stop or change. I don't think. Do you think that if the negotiations in Paris achieved some kind of tenuous balance of power or agreement, it's likely to last? No. No. Why? Well, because it's going to be based on the fact that American hardware is there, and we are negotiating from this position of our tremendous intervention in that country based on our weapons and our B-52s. And all the devastation that we've brought.

And when, or if we withdraw, the status quo is obviously not going to stay the same. How could it, with that enormous quantity, that we represent withdrawn? And it would be like pulling a huge rock out of a pond. The pond isn't going to stay the same. There's a huge area that's got to be filled up. Let me turn now to one of your favorite themes in your books. And that's the impact of personality on history. You talked, for example, about one of the problems in arriving at a fair settlement in China. President Roosevelt's belief in the efficacy of harmony has feeding that good will would bring people of disparate backgrounds to a common compromise. Is it possible that one of President Nixon's strengths in the eyes of future historians will be his willingness to be divisive, his willingness to be tough, and to do what public opinion says at the moment is not good? Well, I think it certainly reveals him as a far more self-confident man than I had thought. But on the other hand, it seems to have no aim.

I think history will see Nixon as a tragic figure. Tragic? Tragic, of course, because he hadn't of all people. He Johnson before him, in a sense was tragic, except he was sort of such a course. He couldn't put it over. He couldn't win the war, and he recognized it, and he bowed out after the McCarthy campaign showed that there was enough sentiment in the country that wanted this thing to be over. And that he didn't think he could win the next election. That seemed to me, I'm continually being naive, as a tremendous opportunity for Mr. Nixon when he got elected in 68, because he seemed like a very shrewd person, and I thought for sure he'd recognized the same thing. The time to do is to end this. He had the opportunity. There was nothing holding him back. I mean, nothing, rather, nothing preventing him. Apparently, there was something holding him back.

And whether it was the desire to keep the wheels of heavy industry turning through armaments, which I have always felt is a great factor in this. Or this terrible thing that all presidents seem to have is, I must not be the one to lose a war. Indeed, he said he lost it. All one need have said was, we have done everything we can to support our ally. Everything we have pledged to do, and we are now withdrawing. But isn't history likely to say that President Nixon took the Vietnam War and put it on the periphery? And he took the three great pillars of the modern world, Russia, China and the United States, and moved them into a healthier relationship with each other. And how could one say that's tragic?

Well, that is tragic, if you believe that he did that. I'm sure in China they say Mao Zedong did it, because I'm sure the impulse came as much from China as from here, because they needed us very badly. But he did reverse course. Nixon certainly grabbed that occasion and handled it very well and very usefully for this country, but look at it now. America, it seems to me, is at the lowest position in a sense vis-à-vis the rest of the world in the way they view us. And this is not an achievement. I think the reaction to the Swedish Prime Minister was one of the saddest, most pathetic, pettiest things I have ever known this country to do. But in the long sweep of things, aren't such things footnotes to history?

Yes, of course. It seemed important to me because we're right with it. We're living with it today. That's a footnote. But Vietnam is no footnote. It could well be some kind of turning point, or if not turning point, at least. Milestone in American history. I myself believe, as I have said before, that I think America, I have to think that my country has enough still of its original direction and ideals and common sense and energy to get itself back on a productive, constructive path. So despite the fact that he's brought about this fundamental alteration, or helped to bring about this fundamental alteration in relationships between the big powers, you still feel that future historians will look upon Mr. Nixon as a tragic figure. Well, I think this last month, and I may be all maybe too deeply in it to judge it objectively, is a development that will never be forgotten or can be forgiven.

And this remains in history. You can't wipe it off the page. And to pursue a negotiation for some end that could only be different by a hair or a few hairs into which he cannot explain to the American people. What it's for to pursue that at the cost of terriboming, of the lives of the people over there, of the lives of our flyers, of the sense of self-respect of the people of this country who don't want us to be doing this kind of thing. This is, I call, tragic, and I don't think it will disappear in the pages of history. This brings us to the most serious consideration now, which is the failure of Congress to retrieve its constitutional power.

Is it realistic to expect that Congress can speak with the same kind of single-mindedness as a president? No, I don't think they will ever do that. But they can certainly exercise their constitutional prerogative of checks, of a check on the executive, which is what they're there for. The balance, rather, if not a check, meant to be a balance on the executive. But when this morning, I read in the paper that Senator Mansfield called President Nixon to, for some, I guess this is official protocol to tell him Congress is in session. And Senator Hughes got the leader of the minority leader, added on the phone, maybe it was on an extension, and await your order, sir. I was really trembling with, can tell you, that seemed to me simply appalling, why should Congress await the president's order? Congress is devalue, or a tool of the presidency? It's not an agent. It's not an instrument of the presidency.

It's an equal arm of government. I think your best book, if I may play critic, was the proud tower. Oh, good. So do I. Yeah. And what you'd characterize the age leading up to World War I, and you said it was bursting with energy and the ambition to release these forces, how would you characterize our age, our society? I think it's most evident characteristic is the loss by man of self-confidence, of belief in himself. If you take a period, almost any earlier century, and look at the portraits, the statues, the stories of how man regarded himself.

If you look last year, we were in Italy, and I was looking at the Michelangelo statues in the Medici chapel. These extraordinary figures, no one could sculpt a representation of man with that pride, that strength, that tremendous quality of strength. We're in any more today because we really don't believe in ourselves. We've had a century of so much violence and cruelty that I think in a sense mankind has been dismayed by his own capacity for evil and his inability to control it in the 20th century. This is a period of declining self-confidence and a loss of hope.

What are the historical forces at work, which in your judgment could produce a return to optimism, a signal of hope and confidence? Oh, I don't know. I have been working now in the 14th century, partly because I'm just tired of the modern world, and partly because it seemed to me a period very like the present. The extraordinary collapse, degeneration, complete loss of faith in the central institutions that had governed men's arrangements, here they're two, in that case, the church. This was a period incidentally that followed the Black Death, which is a very interesting phenomenon, but anyway, the first half of the succeeding century of the 15th was an exaggeration of all these factors that were present in the 50 years before. And yet, the roots or the origins of the Renaissance, of the new world, of the modern world, the world of exploration, the world that discovered America, that discovered printing, of the whole period that was the rebirth.

We're all happening at the same time to people living then, they weren't really visible, but they were there. And I am afraid I am not sufficiently acute observer to tell you what may be happening now, or maybe happening in the next 20 or 30 years, that will begin a new cycle, a fresh period for men. I don't know. For being an incorrigible optimist, despite evidence to the contrary, I choose to end this program on that optimistic note. And I'd like to thank you for inviting us to your home and sharing so much of your experience and wisdom with us. Thank you. Thank you. It's been fun for me.

Thank you and good night. Thank you. Thank you.