This piece first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and is reprinted here with permission
“I am wiser than he is to this small extent that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
Socrates, in Plato, The Apology of Socrates
In October of 1979, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman delivered a lecture at West Point in which she decried the “persistence of unwisdom” among politicians across the ages. Reflecting on how American presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had embroiled the United States more deeply in the Vietnam War, Tuchman bemoaned a perennial “wooden-headedness”—a tendency for politicians to act wishfully, while not allowing themselves to be “confused by facts.”
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