MARC TRACHTENBERG
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: PARIS, FRANCE
I spent 1971—all twelve months—in Paris doing the research for my doctoral dissertation. In terms of the mechanics of doing research, it was a different world back then. For example, photocopying was very expensive, so I had to hand copy most of the passages I thought I might want to use. And I didn’t even know before I arrived which sources I wanted to examine. The published guides to the archives didn’t tell you much, and the more detailed finding aids were all in Paris. Looking back now, it is clear that I didn’t know what I was doing.
That point applied not just to the logistics of research but to more substantive matters as well. I was working on the reparation question after the First World War. Germany had been required by the peace treaty worked out in 1919 to pay compensation to France for the damage done during the war, and this issue played a very important role in international politics in the immediate postwar period. I had selected (or actually, more or less drifted into) that topic for some general reasons. It seemed to me that too much of the work on the origins of the Second World War had focused on Hitler and on the 1930s, and it seemed to me that the 1920s had been neglected. I thought the line between the 1920s and the 1930s had been overdrawn and that people had not paid as much attention as they should have to what we would now call “structural” factors. At the time, I had not heard of that term. It was clear that there had been a struggle over the Versailles system, not just in the 1930s but, even more important, in the period right after World War I, and that struggle had focused on the conflict over reparations. I was in the Berkeley PhD program in history, and at that time grad students were required to have an outside field. I had chosen economics. Therefore, I thought I had the background to study the reparation issue. Without knowing much about the availability of evidence, or about how recently it had been released, I assumed that there would be enough material to support a dissertation on this topic.
Before I arrived in Paris, I had learned what I could about the topic from published sources, and I had absorbed what was then the standard view: reparations were obviously beyond Germany’s capacity to pay; the “vengeful” French had taken a hard line on the question; and Britain and the United States approached the issue in a much more reasonable and conciliatory manner. My goal, when I began my research, was to try to figure out why the French had behaved in that way. In dealing with that issue, I just stumbled around, looking at whatever sources I could find that seemed to have some bearing on the topic.
The Klotz Papers, at the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine in Nanterre, just outside of Paris, was one such source. Louis-Lucien Klotz was the finance minister in the Clemenceau government, the government that negotiated the peace treaty in 1919. I had already learned that Clemenceau had been contemptuous of Klotz—the “only Jew I ever met who has no capacity whatever for finance,” he called him—and that his key advisor on reparation and related issues was Louis Loucheur, the minister of industrial reconstruction. But given Klotz’s position, his papers certainly seemed worth looking at.
And what a surprise they contained! They had the records of the peace conference commission responsible for working out the terms of the reparation settlement; Loucheur was the French representative on that group. The British delegates had suggested some very large figures, and Loucheur clearly thought they were preposterous and that much lower figures were in order. The Germans, in his view, could pay about $30 billion. The British figures were four times larger, and Loucheur commented that “we leave to the poets of the future the task of finding solutions.”1 I remember how startled I was when I read this. Could it be that we had all been sold a bill of goods? Was the standard view about the vindictive French and the more moderate Anglo-Saxons simply a myth? I had found a loose thread in the fabric of the conventional wisdom, and once I started to pull on it, it unraveled very quickly.
But the point is that this was something I had just stumbled into. I had not started out with the goal of proving anything of the sort. I was not even trying to test the conventional view, which I basically shared when I began my research. And that was not the only time I came across key pieces of evidence more or less by accident.
I remember another case, also in an archive just outside of Paris, fit into that pattern as well. I was trying to understand NATO strategy in the 1950s, and I had learned, especially from my friend Bob Wampler, that an important decision had been made at the end of 1954 to adopt a strategy for the defense of Europe that placed heavy emphasis on nuclear weapons. Specifically, this was the decision to adopt a NATO document called MC-48, and I wanted to find out as much as I could about that document and the thinking that supported it. Wampler had gotten some terrific material from the British archives, and I wanted to see what I could find in the archives of the French ministry of defense at Vincennes. The key source there was the papers of General Clément Blanc, the French army chief of staff at the time. I found some remarkable material on MC-48 in that collection, which I used in an article on the subject, first published in French in 1996, and then republished (with some changes) in English in 2012 in The Cold War and After.2
As I found out when I went back to that archive, I had been given a file in the Blanc papers that was not supposed to be provided to researchers; it had been given to me by accident. The reason it was still classified was quite clear: the key thing about MC-48 is that it rested on the assumption that if the decision to launch a major nuclear attack was to be effective, it had to be made very quickly, and that meant the military authorities would play the central role in making that decision. The French government, understanding the great political sensitivity of this issue, naturally wanted to keep the public from finding out what had been decided. Documents showing that this was the government’s goal were actually in the file. It was quite understandable why French governments, even after the end of the Cold War, wanted to keep people from knowing about all this.
I know of other examples where people have been given important documents by accident when doing archival research. A former student of mine, working in the Taylor Papers at the National Defense University, was given important documents on the mistaken assumption that he had a security clearance and would not use them in anything he published. Those documents showed how Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara bullied the Joint Chiefs of Staff into taking a position on the issue of deploying nuclear missiles in Europe that varied enormously from their real position.
Is it right to use material obtained in this way? I personally don’t have any problem with it. I tend to view historians like me as being engaged in a kind of game with people who determine which documents we’re allowed to see. Their goal is often to keep us from “getting the dirt” on policy makers. That’s why they use the term “sanitized” to refer to documents in which key passages, containing the “dirt,” have been deleted before being released. Our goal, on the other hand, is to get the “dirt”—that is, the full truth. In playing that game, we naturally use whatever assets their inefficiency provides for us.
Sometimes we have to develop new methods for that very purpose. One of the main things I ended up doing, when I was writing my book on the 1945–1963 period, was to collect variant versions of the same document: versions declassified differently in different repositories, or different accounts of the same meeting such as U.S. and British accounts of Anglo-American meetings. These accounts were found by doing work in both British and American archives, and the comparisons are often quite illuminating. They show the nature of the bias incorporated into the body of declassified material by virtue of the fact that declassification is a politicized process; once you identify the bias, you can control for it when working out your own interpretation.3 The point here is that the methods you end up using are not just the ones you learned in graduate school—certainly not just ones you learn in a “methods course.” They’re methods you develop to deal with particular problems you encounter as you do your work.
Again, these are things you more or less just stumble into. You can never tell what obstacles you may encounter. Nor can you tell what strokes of luck you’ll have. At one point, I needed to do some work on the American nuclear strategists, and I wanted access to some of the old material at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. I also needed to do some interviewing, and it turned out that people were very accommodating. Fred Kaplan had recently published his book, The Wizards of Armageddon,4 which many of the people I needed help from did not like. They thought Kaplan was very smart, but he was not particularly sympathetic to what they did. They were ready to help me because there was a good chance I’d redress the imbalance and provide a more positive view of what they had done.
I had another stroke of luck with the Kennedy tapes from the Cuban Missile Crisis. I happened to run into McGeorge Bundy, formerly Kennedy’s national security advisor, at a conference at Columbia. He told me in passing that the Kennedy Library had just released transcripts of the tapes of the meetings held at the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Why hadn’t I heard about this? The New York Times had published a story about the release of the transcripts a bit earlier but had not treated it as very important. The Times instead quoted the chief archivist at the Kennedy Library as saying the new material contained “no surprises,” that “it doesn’t change anything. There is nothing new of substance.”5 Still, I thought the new material would be worth a look, and indeed there were some major surprises in the October 16 tapes.
At the time, I didn’t plan on using that material in anything I was writing. I was much more interested in the Berlin crisis and European issues than in the Cuban crisis. But a friend of mine, Steve Van Evera, was taking over as editor of International Security. He said the first issue to be published under his editorship was very important, and he asked me if I had anything he could publish. I said I had come across some terrific material related to the Cuban Missile Crisis and could work something up, which I did. But that draft was not publishable; it was discursive, unfocused, and without any real point. Steve then had me work with his friend John Mearsheimer, whom I had not previously met, and John told me exactly how to restructure the analysis so it spoke directly to questions of interest for security studies people in political science. That restructuring worked, and John’s contribution was so great that I asked him if he would like to be listed as coauthor. He said no, that this article would be important for me, that it would in fact establish my reputation in the field, and he didn’t want to dilute the effect. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.6
So what’s the bottom line here? You try to be systematic when you’re doing your work. You try to have some kind of plan for tackling the topic you’re interested in. But like war plans—which, as the saying goes, don’t survive first contact with the enemy—research strategies should never be viewed as straitjackets. You might try to be systematic, but you will always be amazed at the hit-or-miss process of archival research. You have to be ready to adjust your strategy to whatever obstacles or opportunities turn up. On s’engage, puis on voit (you throw yourself in, and then you look around). That is how Napoleon said you had to approach battle. In real life, of course, it’s important not to overimprovise, and when tackling a problem in international relations, it’s important to think hard about how you propose to proceed. As Dwight Eisenhower declared, “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” And that applies not just to military planning but also to planning a research project in the archives or otherwise: in doing research, you really need to be more flexible than you might think.
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Marc Trachtenberg is research professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Trachtenberg, Marc. Reparation in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
• ——. The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.
NOTES
1. See Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 59–60; Marc Trachtenberg, “Reparation at the Paris Peace Conference,” Journal of Modern History 51, no. 1 (March 1979): 24–55, https://doi.org/10.1086/241847.
2. See Marc Trachtenberg, “La formation du système de défense occidentale: les États-Unis, la France et MC 48,” in La France et l’OTAN, 1949–1996, ed. Maurice Vaïsse, Pierre Mélandri, and Frédéric Bozo (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1996); republished, with some changes, in English translation in Marc Trachtenberg, The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 143–49.
3. See Marc Trachtenberg, “Declassification Analysis: The Method, and Some Examples” and “Declassification Analysis: More Grist for the Mill,” http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/decl/grist.htm. These were posted on a website I created as an online supplement to my book: Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
4. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991).
5. Fox Butterfield, “Library Releases Cuban Crisis Tapes,” New York Times, October 27, 1983.
6. See Marc Trachtenberg, “The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Security 10, no. 1 (1985): 137–63. The editors also asked me to select some key excerpts from the documents for publication and write an introduction to the documents, which was published in that issue as well.