The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

Historian Barbara W. Tuchman opens with a central observation: governments throughout history have persistently pursued policies contrary to their own interests, and wisdom, defined as judgment acting on experience and common sense, operates less effectively in government than in almost any other sphere of human activity. She distinguishes four kinds of misgovernment: tyranny, excessive ambition, incompetence, and folly. The book concerns the last of these. To qualify as folly, a policy must have been recognized as counter-productive in its own time, a feasible alternative must have existed, and the policy must have persisted through a group or succession of rulers rather than a single individual.

Tuchman introduces "wooden-headedness," a recurring mechanism of folly in which leaders assess situations according to fixed preconceptions while rejecting contrary evidence. She cites Philip II of Spain, of whom a historian wrote that "No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence" (7). She illustrates the concept through Plan 17, France's prewar offensive military strategy of 1914, in which the General Staff ignored evidence that Germany would swing through Belgium, with catastrophic consequences.

Before turning to her four major case studies, Tuchman surveys historical examples. The biblical King Rehoboam, who around 930 B.C. rejected experienced advisers and followed young courtiers urging harsher rule, caused the permanent secession of the ten northern tribes. Montezuma passively surrendered the Aztec Empire to Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés, driven by the belief that the Spaniards were emissaries of the returning god Quetzalcoatl. Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 expelled the Huguenots, France's Protestant minority, draining the country of skilled workers for a needless policy. Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 similarly ignored clear warnings. Both illustrate Tuchman's principle that "the power to command frequently causes failure to think" (32).

The first extended case study is the Trojan Horse, treated as the prototype of governmental folly. Drawing on Homer and Virgil's Aeneid, Tuchman recounts how the Greeks hid warriors inside a massive wooden horse and left it outside Troy while pretending to sail away. Capys, a Trojan elder, advised the feasible alternative: burn it or break it open. The priest Laocoon cried, "I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts" (39), and hurled his spear at the Horse. A Greek agent persuaded the Trojans that the Horse was a genuine offering to the goddess Athena. When serpents crushed Laocoon and his sons, the Trojans took the event as divine punishment. Despite further warnings, including those of the prophet Cassandra, the Trojans breached their own walls, and Troy fell. Tuchman concludes that it was free choice, not fate, that took the Horse within the walls.

The second case study examines six successive Renaissance popes (roughly 1470-1530) whose venality and indifference to reform provoked the Protestant Reformation. The Papacy's exile in Avignon and the subsequent Great Schism had commercialized the Holy See, the papal government of the Church. The feasible alternative was reform from the top. Instead, Sixtus IV (1471-84) introduced unprecedented nepotism. Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, 1492-1503) bought the Papacy through bribery and presided over a reign of scandal. Julius II (1503-13) rode into battle to restore the Papal States, the pope's territorial domains in Italy, and commissioned Michelangelo and Raphael, but his reform council served only as a political expedient. Leo X (1513-21) spent extravagantly. When the sale of indulgences, remissions of punishment granted by the Church, provoked the German monk Martin Luther to post his 95 theses at Wittenberg in 1517, Leo hardly noticed. After the brief pontificate of the reformer Adrian VI, Clement VII (1523-34) provoked the Sack of Rome in 1527, while Protestantism advanced. Tuchman identifies three persistent attitudes behind this folly: obliviousness to growing disaffection, the primacy of self-aggrandizement, and the illusion of invulnerable status.

The third case study traces Britain's loss of its American colonies. Tuchman argues that Britain's interest lay in maintaining sovereignty through goodwill, yet successive ministries from 1763 to 1783 destroyed both. British statesman Edmund Burke perceived the central folly: "The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation" (128). After Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War, Prime Minister George Grenville's Stamp Act of 1765 provoked explosive resistance. The feasible alternative, requiring the colonies to tax themselves, was never pursued. Repeal in 1766 was accompanied by the Declaratory Act affirming Parliament's authority in all cases, foreclosing compromise. Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer in William Pitt's ministry, then imposed customs duties that wrecked the gains of repeal. The Coercive Acts of 1774, responding to the Boston Tea Party, united the colonies. Burke pleaded that "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together" (206). The British defeat at Yorktown in 1781 forced Prime Minister Lord North's resignation.

The fourth and longest case study examines American intervention in Vietnam. Tuchman states that the folly consisted not in ignorance of obstacles but in persistence despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable. President Franklin Roosevelt's determination not to restore French colonial rule in Indochina was reversed after his death under cold war pressure to strengthen France. American aid escalated to $2 billion by the decisive French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. After the Geneva settlement partitioned Vietnam, the United States installed Ngo Dinh Diem, chosen for ideological reliability rather than governing ability, as leader of South Vietnam. The blocked reunification elections, which Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would certainly have won, left the North with no recourse but insurgency, and the Viet-Cong, the Communist-led guerrilla movement in South Vietnam, gained strength amid growing peasant discontent.

The Kennedy Administration, which assumed the Vietnam engagement as "simply a given" (283), increased military advisers from 3,000 to 17,000. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith reported from Saigon that the United States was "now married to failure" (300). Kennedy privately told Senator Mansfield he agreed about withdrawal "But I can't do it until 1965, until after I'm re-elected" (303), subordinating national interest to political survival. Under President Lyndon Johnson, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, obtained on the basis of a questionable naval incident, provided a blank check for war, and escalation brought troop strength to over 500,000. The JASON scientific advisory group found that bombing had no effect on Hanoi's will, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lost faith in the enterprise. The Tet offensive of January 1968 shattered official optimism and prompted Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race. President Richard Nixon prolonged the war through "Vietnamization" while intensifying bombing and expanding into Cambodia. The Paris agreement of January 1973 left the situation essentially unchanged from Geneva 19 years earlier. When Saigon fell in 1975, Tuchman observes, the outcome was approximately what it would have been had America never intervened.

Tuchman identifies four specific follies of the Vietnam enterprise: continuous overreaction, the illusion of omnipotence, wooden-headedness in underestimating North Vietnam's determination, and the absence of reflective thought about effectiveness in relation to objectives.

In her epilogue, Tuchman identifies rejection of reason as folly's prime characteristic and lust for power as its chief propellant. She describes a three-stage pattern: fixed principles are established, then rigidify when dissonances appear, and pursuit of failure enlarges the damage until catastrophe results. The book closes with Coleridge's image of history as "a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us" (383), to which Tuchman adds that the light on the waves already passed should enable us to infer the nature of the waves ahead.