(Host) We know that books change people’s lives all the time. But can
books other than sacred texts also change history? Commentator and
Vermont Humanities Council executive director Peter Gilbert says the
answer is yes, and he points to events that happened and books that were
published fifty years ago this year that may have changed history in
ways impossible to overstate.
(Gilbert) In February 1962,
Barbara Tuchman’s compelling narrative history of the beginning of
World War I was published. Entitled "The Guns of August," it tells how
all of Europe was drawn into a war that no one wanted.
As
Meredith Hindley explains in the most recent edition of Humanities
magazine, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, gave President Kennedy a
copy. Fortunately, the President read it. Because as George Santayana
famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it."
Just months later, in October, aerial surveillance
photos showed missile launch sites for Soviet nuclear weapons under
construction in Cuba.
The President and his advisors debated
what to do. Total nuclear war and the lives of tens of millions were at
stake. Military advisors argued for attacking – either bombing the sites
or even invading. The discussion referenced history – what was the best
historical analogy for this situation? The Suez Crisis? The Soviet
Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956? Kennedy ruled out a surprise
bombing of the missile sites because it echoed Japan’s infamous surprise
attack on Pearl Harbor. He decided on a naval blockade.
Having
recently read Tuchman’s book, Kennedy told several advisors about how
each European nation "seemed to tumble into [World War I]. . . through
stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, [miscalculations]
misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority" and
grandiosity.
From Tuchman’s book, Kennedy learned several
things. He learned that he should weigh advice from military experts
just as he weighs counsel from other sources. He learned that it’s hard
to avoid war if the principal concern is that the enemy not get the jump
on you. He learned that he shouldn’t box either the U.S. or the Soviet
Union into a corner, but rather give both countries options, ways to
resolve the crisis without war. And he learned that he should do
everything possible to avoid war. Alluding to Tuchman’s The Guns of
August , Kennedy said, "I am not going to follow a course which will
allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time. The Missiles of
October . If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to
understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to
give our adversary room to move."
We are around, of course, to write and read the history of those events, but we came terrifyingly close to not being.
But
The Guns of August isn’t the only history-changing book. At the very
same time that it was on the New York Times best-seller list, that list
also included To Kill a Mockingbird , which helped the Civil Rights
movement succeed because it caused millions of whites to see the issues
in moral terms. And it included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
But
it’s worth considering: Is it the books that change history, or the
ideas they contain? Or is it, in fact, the people who read them?