"Men and women making decisions under conditions of high uncertainty necessarily envision the future partly in terms of what they believe to have happened in the past. Their understanding of the present is shaped by what they think to have gone on before. Often, their knowledge of what in fact occurred earlier is shallow and faulty, and deficiencies in information breed greater deficiencies and reasoning. Having learned not to trust in expert guesswork or numbers, economic models, or scientific formula or concerns, perhaps they will see that they also need clear understanding of the history that so often in prisons them."
"As an explanation of why these erroneous assumptions were so strong and persistent, i see no alternative to the hypothesis that Americans of this period were captives of an unanalyzed faith that the future would be like the recent past. They visualized World War II as a parallel to World War I."
"What is surprising is how completely their post-war planning was controlled by a handful of analogies and parallels, all from their own lifetime."
"... its members focused on some Soviet actions and ignored others... the men around him ascribed to Soviet machinations developments which might with equal plausibility have been explained in other ways."
"...members of the Truman administration appear to have though about the issues before them in a frame of reference made up in part of historical analogies, parallels, and presumed trends and that the history employed for this purpose was narrowly selected and subjected to no deliberate scrutiny or analysis."
"... Truman and others may have stressed the historical example because it confirmed a conviction to which they had been brought by some deeper, perhaps unconscious process of mind, not because the example of self generated the conviction."
May, E. (1973). Lessons of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy. Oxford University Press.
Recency BiasThe Lessons of HistoryAnalysis of Competing Hypotheses