He held a book in his hands, and my eyes fell on the title: Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams. I was transfixed. The words seemed to speak of a world beyond the walls of the Alliance.

(To go deeper into Hopper’s story and how it merged with the early history of computers and software, see Kurt W. Beyer’s superb book, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age.)

It took her “six or seven years of very interrupted effort” to produce Bible and Sword. Like Morrison, Tuchman accumulated a stack of rejection slips before finding a publisher, a university press that mainly produced niche books. At age 44, Tuchman had finally become a published writer of history— a relatively unknown writer with a small readership, but a published writer nonetheless. And like Morrison, she’d become compulsive about her work, unable to stop herself, one question leading to another, project after project, book after book.

As Tuchman herself wrote in the final paragraph of The Guns of August, “The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies would ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. . . . Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”

President Kennedy Kept Returning to the lessons of Tuchman’s book as he navigated the missile crisis. His brother Robert Kennedy later wrote in Thirteen Days, “Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August had made a great impression on the president. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October,’ he said to me that Saturday night, October 26. ‘If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move.’” Kennedy went for the naval blockade rather than an all-out invasion of Cuba.

So, here we have the story of a mom at home who decides to become a writer of history. She writes a book that the president reads. The president applies the lessons of the book to help avert a nuclear war. And we’re all alive today.

Barbara Tuchman didn’t set out to save the world when she wrote her books. She was just following her encodings. Once she discovered her encodings, she simply trusted them and focused the inner fire on writing books. She didn’t stop herself with questions like “Is this a worthy use of myself?” or “What will my parents think?” or “Does my husband approve?” or “Is this going to make me famous?” or “Will it generate huge social good in the eyes of my peers?” or any of that.