We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we acknowledge that we were startled, in our callow youth, by a suggestion from a professor. The comment came from Adam Ulam, the distinguished scholar of Soviet foreign policy. In response to a question in class, he offhandedly noted that America might have been better off, at least in terms of Cold War policy, if the loser rather than the winner had prevailed in most of the recent presidential elections. He then went on (as I recall) to entertain us with a somewhat lighthearted and of course speculative account of how a Dewey administration might have deterred the Korean war, a Stevenson administration might not have broken with Britain over Suez, a Nixon administration might not have tempted Khrushchev to provoke the Cuban missile crisis, and a Goldwater administration might have kept us out of Vietnam.

I remember being a bit shocked by all this, though in retrospect it’s hard to see why. Except that, as a young man, I was presumably in thrall to the common dual fallacy that, somehow, what happened in the past had to have happened, and that what happened in the past should have happened. Or as Machiavelli put it, “the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in the world there is no one but the vulgar.”