Tuchman and her much-lauded book are not without controversy. Although the book was about Europe’s stumble into World War I, during the 60s and 70s, the Left broadly cited it for the thesis that military planning inherently generated a drive to war. Tuchman, who had moved Left herself, did little to contradict this canard.
It’s also notoriously biased against the Germans. The WW1 era Germans were not Nazis.
Barbara Tuchman's father was publisher of The Nation back in the 1930s. If the magazine reflected her views there probably wasn't much further left she could have moved.
I always wondered about stuff like this:
In the midst of the crisis, he told his brother Bobby: “I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [and call it] The Missiles of October.”
...
As Kennedy told his brother Bobby: “I wish we could send a copy of that book to every Navy officer on every ship right now, but they probably wouldn’t read it.”
There actually was a TV movie, called The Missiles of October, and William DeVane actually said those lines to Martin Sheen, but they always seemed phony to me, like they were something Bobby Kennedy or Arthur Schlesinger cooked up to make JFK look more "literate" and "intellectual" or "decisive" or "incisive."
De Vane does commercials for investing in gold now. I wonder if any senior citizens think it's Jack Kennedy telling them to buy.