A great Jewish historian guided America away from war — is there no one to guide Donald Trump?
Trump could use an advisor like Barbara Tuchman whose ‘Guns of August’ was crucial to JFK during the Cuban missile crisis
JFK signs the order of a naval blockade of Cuba, on Oct. 23, 1962. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky June 25, 2025
Tomorrow will mark the thirteenth day of what future historians might well dub the “Iranian nuclear missile crisis.” Set off by the overwhelming Israeli air campaign against Iran begun on June 13, the crisis seemed to resolve with the American bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites a few days ago. All’s well that ends well — or, more precisely, with the death knell of Iran’s nuclear capability.
The knelling now seems premature. Given what we have since learned of both the lead-up to the bombing, as well as its results, we need to think again about this event, and maybe the best way to do that is to do so in the context of another famous thirteen days, in late October 1962, that spanned the Cuban missile crisis.
On Oct. 16, President John F. Kennedy learned from McGeorge Bundy, his National Security Director, that aerial surveillance of Cuba had revealed the construction of a Soviet military base 90 miles south of Florida. Over the next few days, Kennedy met repeatedly with EXCOMM — the Executive Committee which included various cabinet secretaries, including the Secretary of Defense (Robert McNamara), the Attorney General (Robert Kennedy), military leaders, and national security officials — to discuss the situation.
Over the next dozen days, the crisis deepened. Nikita Khrushchev stalled while the missile site’s construction continued and Kennedy stood by his order to the US Navy to “quarantine” Cuba. (Aware that ordering a naval blockade would constitute an act of war, Kennedy’s advisors suggested this alternative phrasing.) Between these extended EXCOMM meetings, Kennedy was busy consulting with former presidents, most importantly Dwight Eisenhower, as well as foreign leaders, like the British prime minister Harold Macmillan
But perhaps his most influential advisor among these “best and brightest” was neither a member of EXCOMM nor a political leader. Instead, it was the historian Barbara Tuchman whose book The Guns of August had been published several months earlier. By the time the Cuban missile crisis hatched in October, the book had sold over 250,000 copies and was still on the New York Times bestseller list, where it would remain for nearly a year and earn Tuchman the first of her two Pulitzer Prizes.
This was no mean achievement for an historian who had never completed a PhD in history and raised three daughters while researching and writing her books. (It helped, of course, that Tuchman’s husband was a professor of clinical medicine, her father was the philanthropist and American Jewish Congress president Maurice Wertheim, and her mother was Alma Morgenthau, daughter of Henry Morgenthau, the diplomat and advisor to Woodrow Wilson.)
Yet Tuchman’s greatest accomplishment was that John Kennedy was one of the readers who had been mesmerized by her portrayal of World War I as anything but inevitable. Instead, it was the apocalyptic result of disastrous miscalculations made by European leaders who felt increasingly powerless to influence the events that preceded the onset of war.
In his conversations with his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy often referred to Tuchman’s book. In fact, as the younger Kennedy observed a few years later in his own book Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, his brother confided to him that “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.”
Several years later, Kennedy’s speech writer Ted Sorenson echoed this same point. Kennedy, he recalled, frequently paraphrased a conversation recounted by Tuchman. After war was declared, a former German chancellor asked his successor, “How did it all happen?” “Ah, if only one knew” was the reply. Not surprisingly, Kennedy concluded that if the world was destroyed by nuclear war, he did not want “one of these survivors to ask another, ‘How did it all happen?’ and receive the incredible reply: ‘Ah, if only one knew.’”
Given the unprecedented consequences that would follow a single mistake or misstep, the mastery of these events required superhuman will power and wisdom. Or, lacking that, at least as much will power and wisdom a mere human can muster — wisdom, moreover, that had absorbed the lessons drawn by Tuchman in her book. As President Kennedy also told his brother, “If anyone is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and made every effort to give our adversary room to move.”
Fast forward to today. We have learned that President Donald Trump was less frequently meeting with his own EXCOMM — mostly staffed by former Fox News luminaries — than he was gazing in wonder at current Fox News luminaries on his many flat screens. For hours on end, Trump glommed onto the televised images and videos of Iranian military, government, and, of course, residential buildings engulfed in flames from Israel’s repeated air sorties, while the hosts raved about the success of the mission and interviewed guests who urged Trump to join the fray.
Unable to resist, the president acted on their advice. In his four-minute address to the nation, with the Vice-President (JD Vance), Secretary of State (Marco Rubio), and Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth) lined up behind him, the president hailed the “spectacular success” of the mission to destroy three nuclear sites in Iran. He declared that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated” and concluded with a shout-out to a fellow commander-in-chief: “We love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them.”
It turns out God, and our military, perhaps know more than the president about the actual success of the mission. As a leaked report from the Defense Department suggests, the subterranean buildings in Fordo did not collapse and the fissile material stored in Isfahan had been removed before the attack. The bombing mission set back Iran’s nuclear research by a matter of weeks or months, and not by the years or decades the administration had insisted. As the arms control expert Robert J. Einhorn concludes, the “risks of Iran acquiring a small nuclear arsenal are now higher than they were before the events of last week.”
There is no reason to hope that his own Department of Defense reports will obliterate the president’s belief in the images flitting across his many screens. But we can still hope that it will not come to pass that, one day, a Trump official will ask a colleague “How did it all happen?” only to receive the reply “Ah, if only one knew.”
But, of course, most of us already did know.
