The Downhill Road from Troy

By Mayo Mohs

THE MARCH OF FOLLY by Barbara W. Tuchman; Knopf; 447 pages; $18.95

The thread of folly that runs through Barbara Tuchman's books is a filament of doom. In The Guns of August, a wrongheaded French strategy in the first days of World War I leads inexorably to the deadlock of the trenches. The tensions and energies of fin-de-siede Europe and America in The Proud Tower are primed to explode in that same war. And the chaos of the 14th century becomes A Distant Mirror of the modern distemper.

In her latest work, this fatal thread becomes the whole cloth, as Tuchman explores the nature of governmental folly and dissects some choice examples: the Renaissance papacy, 18th century England, the 20th century U.S. Folly, as Tuchman defines it, is not simply incompetence or tyranny or hubris, but rather "the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest." She requires that the policy was perceived as folly in its own time, that a sensible alternative was available, and that the policy nonetheless was carried out by a group over more than one political lifetime. She makes one exception to that last criterion, the brief episode of the wooden horse at Troy.

Tuchman seizes on the legend as evidence that such folly "is an old and inherent human habit." But her purpose seems deeper. The tale, told most memorably by Vergil in the Aeneid, portrays the Trojans as victims of fate. Despite the urgings of citizens that the Greek gift be destroyed or at least broken open, Troy's leaders take it in, hidden Greeks and all, because the gods have so ordained. That excuse will not do for Tuchman. "The gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind," she writes. "The gods' interference . is man's device for transferring the responsibility of folly."

To Tuchman, character is fate, and the characters who blunder through her book are ineluctably fatal to cause or country. The six Renaissance Popes Tuchman puts to the knife are old and easy targets, always diverting to re-examine for some moments of low humor or lofty dudgeon. The author may be a bit extravagant in her criticism, as when she says that Alexander VI, the infamous Borgia Pope, was "as close to the prince of darkness as human beings are likely to come." What then of Caligula? Or Stalin? Or Hitler? But she correctly upbraids the Pontiffs for squandering the papacy's moral standing in Christendom. Whether they "provoked" the Protestant revolt, as Tuchman says, or only abetted it, they lost the respect of bishops and princes who otherwise might not have accommodated the forces of nationalism and economic advantage that fueled the Reformation.

On one count, Tuchman damns Popes from both ends of her pencil. She takes Alexander VI to task for granting an undeserved annulment to the French King, Louis XII, and thereby scandalizing the faithful. A few pages later she faults Clement VII for bowing to Habsburg political pressure and denying an annulment to Henry VIII of England.

Tuchman's standards of folly are less slippery in her magisterial chapters on the British loss of the American colonies. This is vintage Tuchman, where the villains are unreasonable rather than vicious. The principle in question, after all, is debatable: Did Parliament have the right to levy taxes without granting representation to the Americans? Perhaps it did, suggests the author, but the pertinent question was: Could England enforce the right? The answer was no, yet despite sharp reminders from the obstreperous colonies and increasingly vehement critics at home, London marched pigheadedly toward war. When war came, it was managed no better. England lost valuable colonies that might have made a loyal dominion, she suggests, creating a transatlantic power that could have "deterred challengers and perhaps spared the world the Great War of 1914-18 and its unending sequels."

Tuchman's deft sketches in this segment afford a rare and vivid picture of the England that made America free. She finds herself often quoting "the unavoidable Edmund Burke," but drolly notes at one point that the Irish orator who defended the colonies "was talking nonsense as, given his enormous outpouring of words, he frequently did." She watches as the great William Pitt the Elder returns to government on a sea of popularity, only to dash his admirers' hopes by resigning from Commons to become Earl of Chatham. In the end, he is a tragic figure, collapsing in Lords as he gives a rambling speech bemoaning the loss of Empire.

America's loss of face in Viet Nam reaches no such heights. Tuchman despises the actors in this play, dismissing some with heavy irony ("that bold leader Hubert Humphrey"). The drama is familiar by now, and Tuchman rehearses it in discomfiting detail. The missed opportunities are the most haunting: Truman's lost chance to aid Ho Chi Minh in the 1940s; Eisenhower's lost chance to disengage from an incompetent Ngo Dinh Diem in the 1950s; Kennedy's lost chance to withdraw in the 1960s--an opportunity he postponed to the second term he never got to serve. Tuchman relentlessly forces the reader to review the mistakes of the country's misspent years.

Her intent, of course, is not to discourage but to enlighten; she believes that the U.S. is repeating the sins of the past in the "imbecility in El Salvador." She is rightly concerned about the "impotence of reason" in controlling history, but the worry is hardly new. She flails about at scapegoats, at Freud for subjecting modern man to "the controlling power of the dark, buried forces of the soul," and at Christianity for surrendering "personal responsibility" to the "command of God and the Devil." If she had delved into Luther deeper than the notorious indulgences issue, or followed her interest in Plato to his Christian counterpart Augustine--or for that matter concentrated on Freud instead of Freudians--she might have found kindred spirits as eager as she is to discover some glimmer of free will in the dross of human imperfection.

She talks of the "brief brilliant reign" of reason in the 18th century, but it did not enlighten those resolutely wrong colonial experts in England. To see reason at its worst, she might have examined at more length the self-destructive phenomenon that she only touches on in her introduction: the French Revolution.

The lessons Tuchman offers in The March of Folly, in short, may not be worth the drone of the lecture. Tuchman's enduring virtues have been the clarity and grace of her elegant sentences, spinning out images of the past that took the reader to the scene. In this new enterprise she sometimes seems too much in a hurry to pause for that valuable indulgence. Her dense, rapid-fire synopsis of the siege and fall of Troy is, inexplicably, almost as wooden as the horse. Her enthusiastic expedition into papal territory (where she solemnly scolds, but obviously admires, the ferocious warrior-Pope Julius II) stops dead for impenetrable paragraphs dealing with Renaissance politics. The sharply polemical tone in the Viet Nam section undermines the intended message.

Only in the evenhanded section on the American Revolution does Tuchman display her great virtues at their best. That subject could have consumed a book. It should have been this one. --By Mayo Mohs