The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
Tuchman, Barbara W.
The Folio Society: London 1984
Date finished: 2002-12-04
This book looks at cases where rulers and governments have pursued foolish courses of action despite all arguments to the contrary and all indications of disaster. The introduction uses the Trojan Horse and Cortez's defeat of Montezuma as examples of folly. Tuchman defines folly as a policy pursued despite contemporary arguments to the contrary, so policies only condemned in hindsight don't qualify. Other conditions in Tuchman's definition are that a reasonable alternative course of action was available and that the misguided policy was pursued by different people over time.
The three parts of the book contemplate different examples of folly. The first example is the corruption and power-mongering of the Renaissance popes, whose neglect of the Church and disdain for public unhappiness led to the Lutheran schism. This section is full of scurrilous anecdotes and is quite entertaining.
The same can be said of the second section, on the British government's wooden-headed attempts to enforce taxation on the American colonies, taxation that couldn't be effectively collected and ended up sparking the American Revolution. Both sections are clear and enjoyable overviews of the course of events that never get lost in minute details. I really enjoyed these two sections; like Tuchman's The Proud Tower, they're fun to read.
The third section on US policy in Vietnam is the weakest, though I still enjoyed it and learned a lot from it. Tuchman obviously dislikes Nixon a whole lot (who can blame her?), and has it in for most of the US officials responsible for the Vietnam War. Because this was the most recent example in the book, this part is the most detailed, at times tediously so. It's also the most disturbing, in the light of current events in Iraq. The US government claimed that the populace of South Vietnam wished to resist Communism, and therefore required assistance; this was a lie. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed after a Navy ship was supposedly fired upon; this apparently was also a lie. The end result was three million dead, a devastated Vietnam that was overrun by Communism anyway, and the end of trust in the government. I wonder if, twenty years from now, we'll look back to 2002 and view it as the start of a similarly misguided effort.
(On the bright side, this book also shows that the most corrupt systems can still collapse or change under widespread public pressure, especially when applied on a scale of decades.)