Quote of the Day (Barbara Tuchman, on ‘Mankind's Tragedy’)

“Mankind's tragedy [is]: that it can draw the blueprints of goodness but it cannot live up to them.” ―Historian Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989), The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966)

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning historian Barbara Tuchman died on this day 30 years ago in Greenwich, Conn. Working outside academe, she distilled complex events into clear narratives and vivid prose for a mass audience.

But it was her impact on one reader in particular where she may have made her greatest contribution. It was fortunate for the world that in 1962, John F. Kennedy, for all his faults, nevertheless possessed a curious mind and an ability to apply the lessons of history.

From The Guns of August, Tuchman’s examination of the events leading up to WWI, the young President had absorbed the fact that rival powers, if they do not stop to consider their next move each step of the way, risk being drawn into cataclysmic conflicts. That realization saved the U.S. from plunging into a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis.