Bias and the 'Heroine of Popular History"

Barbara Tuchman

The Teleprompter, Barbara Tuchman told an interviewer in the early 1980s, "allows an inadequate, minor individual to appear to be a statesman" wrote Bruce Cole in the Wall Street Journal.[1]  Mrs. Tuchman (1912-1989) was a historian, probably best known for her 1962 history of the beginning of World War I, The Guns of August.  The WSJ’s Cole is careful to point out that, given Mrs. Tuchman’s “liberal leanings” (her father owned the leftist publication The Nation and Barbara Tuchman began her writing career as a correspondent for the magazine, covering the Spanish Civil War), she was actually referring to President—and statesman—Ronald Reagan.

Of course, when one reads just the bare statement, without any clueing in as to its background, the image one immediately conjures up is of one sad excuse for a statesman—and president—Barack Hussein Obama, mmmm-mmmm-mmmm.

In his effort to present Barbara Tuchman as a ‘heroine of popular history,’ Mr. Cole unwittingly sheds light on more of the writer’s biases than intended.  (No judgment here, we all have them).  Describing her thinking as a writer and historian, Cole emphasized that Mrs. Tuchman stressed “the importance of using primary sources and unpublished material, the necessity of visiting the sites where history was made, the use of corroborative detail—‘history by the ounce’ as [Mrs. Tuchman] called it—to keep the historian from "soaring off the ground into theories of his own invention."[2]

All very well, an ideal for which all historians should strive, and quite interesting in light of what follows.  For Mr. Cole goes on to point out that Mrs. Tuchman also “believed sensibly that it's better to ‘arrive at theory by way of evidence than the other way around, like so many revisionists today.’”[3]

Again, sage advice; but, one cannot help but wonder if this was how the “heroine of popular history” arrived at her conclusion about Teleprompters and the fortieth president of the United States.

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[1] Bruce Cole, “a Heroine of Popular History,” The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/

article/SB10001424052970203960804577243093554779020.html (accessed 28 August 2012).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.