The Guns Of August

The Guns of August, published 50 years after the outbreak of war, provided the public a lesson in history wrapped in a beautiful piece of prose. It was a novel meant for public consumption, and thus while a book of nonfiction, it was not meant for hard historical inquiry. It sold well due to its readability, and the public assumed it was a comprehensive analysis. Tuchman used “the vast majority of memoir material (that) had been published, as well as major collections of documents” in order to “give the reader a sense of intimacy with events” (Samuel R. Williamson Jr. “Revaluation: Fifty Years On: The Guns of August, Always Popular, Always Flawed.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 121, no. 1, 2013, p. 163). Readers of the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War and just after the Bay of Pigs disaster, could therefore readily access and become engaged in Tuchman’s interpretation of the events leading to the first World War as it looked like the US was very close to entering a third. Kennedy is widely known to have used The Guns of August in his response to Communist aggression during the era (Taylor, Maxwell D.