Books! Writing, Editing, Publishing, and Reaching Readers

Chapter Six: History

The essential truth of historical writing is that it is not immutable. History covers and interprets events which over time can be reconsidered.

The history of the United States, as it was understood for most of the past 250 years, was dominated by the role of the founders, Manifest Destiny as the population moved West, the renunciation of slavery in the wake of the Civil War, and the twentieth century of great American power: World War II and the Cold War, ending with the triumph over the Soviet Union.

In 1980, Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States started the reinterpretation of American history, with its emphasis on social inequality and discrimination. It is still #1 on Amazon’s listings in several nonfiction categories.

In recent years, the conventional narrative has been even more substantially revised. Harvard professor Jill Lepore’s 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States brilliantly changed the traditional framework by pointing out that the standard perception of the past largely overlooked the half (or more) of the country that were women, Blacks, and Native Americans.

The seminal dates in history remain firm. The Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1776. The start of the Civil War: April 12, 1861. The attack on Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941. The assassination of John F. Kennedy: November 22, 1963. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: September 11, 2001.

But what those dates meant and how events unfolded continue to be reconsidered and revised. History has become much more of a tug of war over narrative than it once was. Historical writing is almost never truly the last word.

As a book editor, I learned this lesson shortly after I arrived at Random House in the mid-1980s.

I mentioned earlier my admiration for the Landmark series of histories by notable writers, books written for the benefit of younger readers that I had so enjoyed. They were largely out of print, but copies were available in a company library, and I thought about reissuing them.

I selected Remember the Alamo! by Robert Penn Warren as the place to start because my assistant, Lisa Kaufman, had worked with James Michener on his epic historical novel Texas, which meant she would have a sense of how well the Landmark book, which had been published in 1958, represented the event. Lisa began to read. Soon, she reported a problem.

Here is how she remembered that experience: The glorification of the defenders and the excoriation of the Mexicans and Indians (as they were then called, sometimes “savages”) had to be updated to contemporary standards. At my request, Lisa contacted the illustrious author, who said he was embarrassed by the racism and would, for free, do the revision.

In the meantime, as we examined other titles, we concluded that these works of history, written in the 1940s and ’50s, probably would not withstand scrutiny of their language and judgments decades later.

Chagrined, Lisa had to tell Robert Penn Warren that we had decided to abandon the idea of relaunching the Landmark series.

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As with biography, history has to be judged through the prism of the author’s expertise and point of view. These books are simply one person’s (or a collaboration’s) conclusions.

Historical writing is rendered in many different styles. Writers with a background in journalism can be well suited to writing history. They are expected to give precedence to facts rather than opinions, with judgments supported by sufficient evidence.

In 1943, Alan Barth, an editorial writer for the Washington Post, said memorably that “news is only the first rough draft of history,” and that is why journalism is so essential to the recording of events.

This has become a credo.

An excellent example of a journalist succeeding as an historian, as I mentioned earlier, is Rick Atkinson, whose two prize-winning series, on the American Revolution and on World War II, reflected his years as a reporter and editor at the Post and are widely admired for their readability.

Atkinson’s self-assessment as a journalist underestimates his now scholarly status and approach. His research is prodigious and his commitment to the facts resolute.

Another example: The great documentarian Ken Burns and his writing partner Geoffrey Ward have amassed a spectacular record of combining imagery and storytelling that is essentially impervious to academic condescension. Their films and books are notable for presenting events and characters from history without the burden of ideology or bias that can undermine histories by even the best of scholars.

University professors may possess unsurpassed knowledge and can source the smallest of details, but sometimes their writing is too dense for the general reader — and that complexity can be confused or justified as erudition.

One of the requirements for acceptance by university presses is the peer review process, in which anonymous specialists critique manuscripts on submission. This is still accepted practice. My sense of this aspect of assessment is that it can undermine original thinking and good writing in favor of reinforcing the accepted scholarship.

The academics’ retort would be that as a journalist I am biased against the standards demanded by these peer reviewers. I don’t expect them to agree with me. Describing and interpreting the past, and as in every other field involving facts, demands that the facts be verifiable — and resistant to challenge. But they must also be accessible to readers.

Another complicated aspect of portrayals of history is how much of it there is. The rise and fall of the Roman empire is a subject of everlasting interest. That saga took place over centuries with a canvas of backgrounds, events, and characters that could and already have encompassed entire libraries of literature.

There are comprehensive histories of the Roman era, but no version I am aware of is so definitive that no further books will be necessary.

Any slice of history can serve as the basis for an expansive story to provide context — even, for example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a speech of just 272 words, as Garry Wills proved in his wonderful 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. A slice is almost always the basis for something much larger.

For the writer of history, the challenge is to achieve the authority to be taken seriously and to maintain an approach that provides readers with facts, interpretation, and satisfaction.

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My qualifications on the writing of history come from what is generally known as the Vietnam war — or, as the Vietnamese call it, “the American war.”

In the mid-1960s, as the war escalated and opposition developed, I was of draft age but received a deferment because of the lasting effects of a nerve injury in my right hand in a college accident. I thus never had to answer the existential question in my generation of what I would have done if I had been drafted.

I worked as an assistant to I. F. Stone, whose journalism shaped expectations of the likelihood of American failure, because he memorably wrote of U.S. policy makers’ ignorance of Vietnamese history and of their exaggeration of what the threat of communism in Indochina would mean to American power.

Stone’s study of history provided the support that his position on events demanded.

Over the decades, I would become immersed in Vietnam. In 1970, I was sent to Saigon as a correspondent by the Washington Post. The editor, Ben Bradlee, never asked for my views on the war. It was his belief that his young reporter would write what he learned and saw and would not press the case for or against the conflict.

Before, during, and after the experience on the ground, I read widely on the topic. I was in Vietnam when the Pentagon Papers, were published by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Over the years I would refer to this compilation of documents about the shaping of American policy in Vietnam as important source material. My reading on the war included seminal works like Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1973, and the French journalist Bernard Fall’s brilliant books, including Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina.

After I became a book editor, I was responsible for publishing books by journalists who offered perspective about the war, among them Morley Safer, Malcolm Browne, Ward Just, John Laurence, and Bill Prochnau.

I was not the editor of Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, the winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize and the 1988 National Book Award, but I consider it the best history of the conflict.

Sheehan was a young reporter for UPI in the 1960s, as the U.S. role in the war deepened. He was one of a trio of reporters — David Halberstam of the New York Times and Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press were the others — who were influential and controversial in framing what proved to be the misbegotten strategies and objectives of American policy.

In the spring of 1972, while I was in Saigon, Sheehan came to Vietnam on a reporting trip, and he told me that he was planning to write a book about Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, who had served as a military officer and senior civilian adviser in the war and had recently been killed in a helicopter crash. When I heard Sheehan talk about the book, my sense was that it could become the classic history of the U.S. in that conflict. He used Vann’s life story as the channel through which the war could be understood. With immense accretion of detail and an immersive writing style, Sheehan achieved his objective.

The Vietnam war was especially notable for how divisive it was: hawks, doves, the anti-war movement, tens of thousands of American deaths, and countless Vietnamese casualties were the core narrative of the conflict. To read Sheehan’s book now, decades later, is to recognize its brilliance. There is not a scintilla of gratuitous judgment or polemic to emphasize the disaster that Vietnam was for the United States.

Great historical writing will always depend on how completely the historian can reach conclusions without falling into the trap of ideology or conventional presumptions.

Over a period of ten years I worked as editor and publisher with Robert S. McNamara, whose years as secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968 made him the most widely blamed figure for the war’s trajectory, although the conflict persisted for seven more years after he left office.

His memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, published in 1995, was exceptionally controversial because the general assumption of readers and critics was that McNamara was seeking redemption for his role in the debacle.

In fact, McNamara’s main purpose was to show how the war had gone so wrong because whatever the American intentions may have been, official hubris and arrogance were the sources of the ignominy and defeat, which McNamara acknowledged.

I drew on my experience with McNamara, my years as a reporter, and the other books I had read and published to write my own book, LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail, which was published in 2025.

More than fifty years after the North Vietnamese prevailed in the war, a unified, communist-led Vietnam is a dynamic society that, ironically, has good ties with the United States. It is the U.S. that still bears the scars of the conflict, most notably the loss of belief that America was benign in its policies around the world and would always prevail.

I do not imagine that the Vietnam war will ever be interpreted as a success for the United States, although the worst predictions of its consequences never happened. That judgment is the result of how much work has been done by so many to reach that firm (for now) historical conclusion.