Iwould like to express my thanks to those who have contributed in different ways to this book: to Professor William Wilcox, editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers at Yale University, for a critical reading of Chapter IV; to Richard Dudman, former bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in Washington and author of Forty Days with the Enemy (a record of his captivity in Cambodia), for a reading of Chapter V; to Professor Nelson Minnich of the Catholic University of America for a reading of Chapter III. Reading does not imply agreement, particularly in the case of the last-named. I am solely responsible for all interpretations and opinions.
For consultation or help on various matters, I am grateful to Professor Bernard Bailyn of the History Department at Harvard University, to Dr. Peter Dunn for his researches on the return of the French troops to Vietnam in 1945, to Jeffrey Race for introducing me to the concept concealed under the jargon “Cognitive Dissonance,” to Colonel Harry Summers of the Army War College, to Janis Kreslins of the library of the Council on Foreign Relations, and to all the persons listed under the references for Chapter V, who were kind enough to make themselves available for oral questioning.
For help in finding illustrations, I am indebted to Professor Emily Vermuele of the Classics Department at Harvard, to Joan Sussler of the Lewis-Walpole Museum at Farmington, Connecticut, and her colleagues, to Marc Pachter of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., to the Department of Prints and Drawings and the Greek and Roman Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to the Department of Prints and Photographs of the Library of Congress, to Charles Green of the Museum of Cartoon Art and Catherine Prentiss of the Newspaper Comics Council, and to Hester Green of A. M. Heath and Company, London, for her magic hand applied to the National Portrait Gallery (London) and the British Museum. The whole owes a coherent existence to Mary McGuire of Alfred A. Knopf, who kept track of a stream of disconnected material and buttoned up loose ends. Extra thanks go to Robin Sommer for devoted and effective guardianship of accuracy in the proofs.
My further thanks go to my husband, Dr. Lester R. Tuchman, for suggesting Rehoboam and for discovering the references to ancient siege warfare and the illustration of an Assyrian siege engine; to my daughter and son-in-law, Lucy and David Eisenberg, and my daughter Alma Tuchman for reading the manuscript as a whole, with helpful comments; to my agent, Timothy Seldes of Russell and Volkening, for availability and help whenever needed; and to my editor and publisher, Robert Gottlieb, for critical judgment and extended endurance of auctorial anxieties on the telephone.