Book Reviews

Nigel Hey, The Star Wars Enigma: Behind the Scenes of the Cold War Race for Missile Defense. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006. 275 pp. $27.95.

Reviewed by David Hafemeister, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stan- ford University

Nigel Hey’s book, The Star Wars Enigma, is a diplomatic/political history of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The book belongs on the shelf with Francis Fitzgerald’s Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) and William Broad’s Star War- riors: A Penetrating Look into the Lives of the Young Scientists behind Our Space-Age Weaponry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). The Star Wars Enigma avoids technical analysis of SDI beyond stating the consensus view that SDI was made up of a series of difªcult tasks that were well beyond the technology of the time. A puzzling question thus arises when Hey describes the political and diplomatic impact of SDI on the Soviet Union. Why did Mikhail Gorbachev remain so concerned about SDI even after he received advice from Roald Sagdeev (the director of the Soviet Space In- stitute) and Evgenii Velikhov (the vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute) that SDI was modern-day Lysenkoism (p. 133)? I will return to this issue shortly. Most scientists and engineers who examined the SDI technologies came to the conclusion that SDI was several orders of magnitude away from being a viable system. The daunting obstacles to SDI’s success can be seen by asking a question: Would an X-ray laser based on a pop-up missile launched from a U.S. submarine in the south- ernmost Artic Ocean have had sufªcient time to destroy a missile launched 3,000 ki- lometers away in Kazakhstan? Not enough time would have been available to destroy the Soviet missile in its boost phase. Closer missiles could have used fast-burn boosters to survive, if indeed the X-ray laser ever would have worked in the ªrst place. Beyond these complications, SDI was further compromised by the extreme difªculty of ob- taining adequate battle-management information for thousands of directed-energy weapons (DEW) mobilized against a massive nuclear attack. This pessimism was further compounded by the relative ease of offensive countermeasures to foil SDI. Hey describes the technical reservations of Gerald Yonas, who spearheaded the ªrst technical programs when he was the SDI Organization’s deputy director and chief science adviser from 1984 to 1986. Hey discusses the reports put out by the Ofªce of Tech- nology Assessment and the National Academy of Sciences back-channel communications with Soviet scientists, but he fails to mention the best technical analysis of SDI, Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 2008, pp. 139–162 © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

139

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

which was carried out by the American Physical Society (APS). The APS DEW panel of seventeen scientists had a strong contingent of insiders, four from government weapons laboratories and three from industrial laboratories. These insiders were well- versed in the government’s SDI research. After the APS report went through declassiªcation in 1987, the presidential Ofªce of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), acting for the Executive Branch, refused to allow the APS to present its results. The government denied itself the best study on SDI because APS identiªed the physical limitations of SDI. While working in the State Department’s Ofªce of Strate- gic Nuclear Policy at the time, I was contacted by the APS to arrange a brieªng for the report at the State Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. OSTP tried twice to cancel the brieªng, but my State Department boss would not allow this to happen. He encouraged me to hold the brieªng as long as nothing about it was disclosed to the press. Twenty years later it seems reasonable to recount this epi- sode in the Journal of Cold War Studies. In 1987, the SDIO abruptly shifted from DEW to hit-to-kill weapons using kinetic-kill vehicles. Hey does not adequately explain the speciªc reasons for this major change other than quoting Yonas’s 1986 speech: “The most straightforward and best–proven approach to interception of a high-velocity object in space is with a very smart homing projectile” (p. 187). The broader lesson is that our government institutions did not competently examine the science and technology. Why did the Defense Department’s own Defense Science Board fail to point out SDI’s deªciencies? This brings us back to the question raised earlier: Why did Gorbachev try so hard to kill SDI? In answering the question we need to bear in mind that scientists debate facts, whereas politicians often prefer to debate perceptions. Roald Sagdeev comments: “I think the moment Gorbachev understood that SDI wouldn’t work, he decided that those who were trying to push a futile system must have some kind of hid- den agenda. Even some military spokesmen thought...[the United States was] planning to use the cover of SDI to deliver nuclear weapons from orbit” (p. 147). Much has been made of the agreement that Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev nearly signed at Reykjavik in October 1986 to eliminate all nuclear weapons. (Whether the Pentagon and Congress would have concurred is doubtful.) The proposal to do away with nuclear weapons failed because Reagan did not agree to Gorbachev’s last-minute request for a ban on SDI testing in outer space. Both Reagan and Gorbachev were sad- dened by their failure to conclude the weapons ban, but over the next few years the two countries achieved several important agreements, including the Intermediate- Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). So, did SDI shorten the Cold War? Gorbachev responds: “I cannot agree that the SDI initiative had this much importance” (p. 219). Velikhov comments: “The idea that it [SDI] accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union is nonsense.” Sagdeev concurs: “The reasons were com- pletely internal.” Sagdeev is aware that “many in the West were persuaded that SDI intimidated the Soviets so much that they decided to dismantle the communist system,” but he dismisses this notion as ridiculous and “a kind of historic injustice.” Even the late Edward Teller, one of the most ardent proponents of SDI, acknowledged that

140

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

SDI was not what brought the Cold War to an end: “The obvious reasons for the failure...were,ªrst, misgovernment, and second, failure to acquire military superiority beyond Eastern Europe.” A similar point was made in May 1992 by then-Central Intelligence Agency Director Robert Gates when, in response to complaints by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he conceded in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association that the U.S. government was surprised by the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union. Senator Moynihan then described his own predictions published in 1979 that the USSR would eventually collapse because of its poor economy and the West only needed to wait. Former Secretary of State George Shultz later concurred: “I think we won the Cold War because their system was essentially a bankrupt system” (p. 233). Reagan’s buildup of strategic offensive weapons affected the USSR because of the increased risks of inadvertent nuclear war, not because either side could ever win a nuclear war. The impact of SDI on Gorbachev was much less than that of economics and nuclear instability. SDI could have shortened or extended the Cold War by at most six months. What actually happened six months after Reykjavik is that the United States abandoned DEW in favor of kinetic-kill vehicles. By that point SDI was becoming ir- relevant and did not prevent the Soviet Union from soon accepting INF, CFE and START. One could even argue that SDI slowed the end of the Cold War by preventing major agreements at Reykjavik. One could also argue that the extra push from SDI on top of Gorbachev’s other problems made him more compliant, not out of fear but out of system-overload. Either way, though, the effect was not large. Hey does not discuss the possibility that SDI extended the Cold war and concludes: “There is no way of measuring how much SDI contributed to the Soviet Union’s fall” (p. 227). The Star Wars Enigma is a balanced, well-researched, and well-written treatment of SDI by a government laboratory insider, a ªtting volume to read alongside Way Out There in the Blue.

✣✣✣

Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 288 pp. $45.00.

Reviewed by Jonathan Gosnell, Smith College

The central premise of Todd Shepard’s ambitious book will be of no surprise to those familiar with contemporary French society and culture. Modern France, he argues, was powerfully, perhaps even deªnitively, transformed by its 132-year colonial relationship with Algeria. The notion that French politics and French politicians, voters, and institutions, are still profoundly marked by the severing of that violent yet inti- mate union will also come as little surprise. That said, there is much to learn from Shepard’s careful historical analysis of the ªnal, dramatic years of “French Algeria” (the entity that existed from 1830 to 1962).

141

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

Shepard guides his readers through the twists and turns of judicial and political de- bates on colonial identities in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as a war was being waged between the French military and Algerian nationalists. He is certainly correct in his contention that the Algerian Revolution (or war of national independence) was also a French Revolution. The Fifth Republic emerged directly out of the Algerian crisis, shaped by General Charles de Gaulle, who agreed to come out of semi-retirement from public life if allowed to be its principal architect (and beneªciary, critics claim). Shepard examines with a critical eye how leaders such as de Gaulle altered the relationship with the former colony, abandoning interests that had lasted for more than a century, thereby “forgetting French Algeria” (p. 101). Shepard argues that the French “in- vented decolonization” in the closing chapter of the Franco-Algerian saga, opting to envision independence as an inevitable outcome in the advancing “tide of History.” “In Algeria, as elsewhere,” he writes, “decolonization now appeared as wholly consistent with a narrative of progress—the ongoing extension of national self- determination and its corollary values: liberty, equality, fraternity and the Rights of Man—that had begun with the French Revolution” (p. 6). But the distinct nature of Algerian decolonization should be recognized. Shepard has taken up a fascinating and beguiling set of questions in his book. In what ways did French ofªcials classify colonial populations? How French was Algeria in 1930? 1958? 1962? In what ways did the authorities fail to serve and protect individuals who had attained French citizenship? In negotiating Algerian independence, did French ofªcials betray the Republic and republican traditions of assimilation? Al- though Shepard is not the ªrst to ask these questions, his thoughtful responses, based on new archival materials, are poignant. But the line of inquiry he adopts places him in a peculiar position vis-à-vis those typically considered to be on the wrong side of history. Would preserving French ties in Algeria have been the republican (i.e., egali- tarian) decision? Was the far-right paramilitary Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) somehow justiªed in attempting to maintain French Algeria, albeit through extreme violence? Shepard certainly does not condone OAS activities, but he offers a se- rene analysis of a particularly troubling period. He alludes to the hypocrisies of the French Republic in showing how religious or cultural differences helped and hindered the formation of identities in Algeria. Shepard’s study is part of a renewed French and non-French scholarly interest in France’s colonial history, particularly the ruptures and convergences of the French Republic, nation, and empire. The French colonial realm was rarely if ever transparent, and Shepard’s study convincingly illustrates this point. The war that some in France would not ofªcially acknowledge as such was perhaps the most ºagrant of colonial ambiguities. Shepard carefully probes documents from the period, ascribing alternative meanings to words like rapatrié, l’exode, Français, and Algérien. This analysis will probably be of greatest interest to historians-at-heart in search of new insights and compelled by the vicissi- tudes of colonial rhetoric. The extent to which colonial Algeria and Algerians could become French was perhaps the central point of contention dividing settler populations and metropolitan authorities in Paris. No consensus was ever reached. Well before the shattering of the Franco-Algerian bond, the ambivalence of French policy on

142

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

assimilation was evident. The Muslim elite had spent decades attempting to convince colonial and metropolitan authorities of their worthiness to receive French citizenship, to no avail. By the time they were ªnally recognized collectively as French citi- zens, they had already begun to conceive of themselves in other (Algerian) terms. The tardy creation of French colonial citizenship did little to make Algeria French. There is an assumption throughout the book that Algeria had in fact become French. This is a highly subjective issue. The “Frenchness” of resident populations, their culture, and Algerian territory was continually questioned. Matters were perhaps never as nebulous as in the period from 1958 to 1962, as Shepard indicates. Algeria was not yet “French,” and the Sahara was not yet a recognized part of Algeria (pp. 139, 142). At the same time, identities were becoming progressively clear as “French” and “Algeria” became increasingly separate. The Algerian nationalist organi- zations—the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien (UDMA)—despite periodic efforts to unite, seemed to represent the two diverging sides. The Invention of Decolonization is divided into ten well-written chapters, including an informative introduction and a too brief conclusion. The bibliography includes a lengthy list of primary sources that have informed Shepard’s account, but a descrip- tion of their content would have been very helpful for researchers. Two chapters of the book contain wonderfully tantalizing if somewhat superªcial treatments of gender, sexuality, and religion (Judaism) in the colonial realm. Evocative and sometimes shocking illustrations capture, for instance, the unveiling (“liberating”) of Muslim women (p. 188) as well as attempts to counter the prevailing negative attitudes about Pied-Noir men (p. 225). Shepard argues that “the Algerian Revolution was the crucial conºict for French people over the shape and meaning of France in the post-1945 era” (p. 269). Such a statement in a book that focuses only on the Algerian War years is bold and largely unsubstantiated. One would have to delve further into the Fifth Republic to determine whether the point is valid.

✣✣✣

Priscilla Roberts, ed., Behind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World beyond Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xviii ϩ 559 pp.

Reviewed by Robert Ross, Boston College and Harvard University

Behind the Bamboo Curtain is an important collection of essays on Sino-Vietnamese relations during the Cold War. The book covers the period from the ªrst contacts between the Chinese Communist Party and the Vietnamese Communist Party in the late 1940s through the aftermath of the uniªcation of Vietnam in 1975 and covers all the major issues in Sino-Vietnamese relations. To address these issues, Priscilla Rob- erts has assembled a group of prominent historians on Sino-Vietnamese relations, including some of the best Western-trained historian and the best Chinese-trained historians. An excellent contribution from a Vietnamese historian and well-

143

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

documented chapters on Soviet and French policy further augment the importance of the volume. The contributors make extensive use of primary documents from the United States, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Vietnam, and Russia and offer authoritative analyses. The volume concludes with a valuable selection of translated Vietnamese documents. Yang Kuisong’s chapter explores the PRC’s policy during the 1954 Geneva Conference. He underscores Mao Zedong’s shifting tactics in response to changing international circumstances. As the likelihood of U.S. intervention in the Indochina War increased, Mao developed greater interest in a peace agreement and stepped up his effort to persuade Hanoi to accept a divided Vietnam. Similarly, in the aftermath of the 1954 Geneva agreements, China advised Southeast Asian Communist parties to give up armed struggle. Yang shows that when Mao later understood that the PRC’s peace offensive would not achieve his objectives, he once again promoted armed struggle both in South Vietnam and throughout the region, though he was careful to avert escalated conºict with the United States. Noam Kochavi reassesses President John Kennedy’s policy toward China and considers whether he would have been able to seek improved relations with the PRC if he had not been assassinated. Kochavi offers the cautious judgment that Kennedy held a deeply pessimistic view of mainland China until his death and that U.S. policymaking was only one of many factors that shaped the Sino-American relationship. Among the other factors were the views of leaders in Beijing, who at that time were equally unprepared to seek a rapprochement. In addition, U.S.-China conºict over the escalating hot war in Vietnam would have necessarily obstructed improved relations. Li Xiangqian explores the relationship between the Vietnam War and Chinese domestic politics. He considers the impetus behind Mao’s implementation of the Third Line, which involved the transfer of Chinese industry from vulnerable coastal and border regions to the Chinese interior. Li, relying on party documents, argues the controversial position that Mao’s deeply-held ideological priorities, rather than security concerns, spurred him to launch the Third Front and that Mao initiated the Third Line prior to the escalation of the Vietnam War. James G. Hershberg and Chen Jian offer what may be the ªnal word on U.S.- China signaling in 1965, when the PRC sought to contain escalation of the Vietnam War and to avoid the mistakes and the failed deterrence of the Korean War. They examine China’s use of its media and of “back-channel” communications through visiting diplomats and heads of state to warn the United States of the danger of escalation. They further examine the U.S. government’s receipt and interpretation of the signals from Beijing. Hershberg and Chen reach the judicious conclusion that China’s signaling likely reinforced President Lyndon Johnson’s inclination toward a cautious approach to escalation, lest the United States provoke Chinese intervention and ªnd itself in a “second Korean War.” Niu Jun’s chapter on U.S.-China relations examines the strategic and policymaking context for China’s opening to the United States from 1970 to 1972. He

144

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

shows that the growing Soviet threat to Chinese border security and Mao’s pragmatic efforts to limit radical inºuence on foreign policymaking during the Cultural Revolu- tion contributed to the moderation of China’s policy toward the United States. In addition, he demonstrates that China’s mounting concern about Hanoi’s growing military and political cooperation with the Soviet Union bolstered Mao’s readiness to seek improved relations with the United States. Chapters by Shu Guang Zhang, Li Danhui, and Shen Zhihua examine the international political context of Chinese aid to North Vietnam. Zhang documents the growth of Chinese aid to both Hanoi and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam against the backdrop of China’s escalating competition with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The PRC at this time aggressively used economic aid as an in- strument of foreign policy throughout the Third World. Li examines the Sino-Soviet dispute about Soviet transport of aid to North Vietnam through Chinese territory and airspace and the Soviet Union’s requests for troop and aircraft deployments in south- ern China. Her research establishes that the larger Sino-Soviet security conºict inhib- ited the two countries from cooperating on the provision of aid. During the 1960s China sought to minimize any unnecessary and gratuitous Soviet presence on Chinese territory, and the Soviet Union for its part cited the delays of shipments as evidence of China’s weak support for North Vietnam’s armed struggle. Only in the early 1970s were Moscow and Beijing able to establish procedures to minimize delays. Shen Zhihua observes that even as Mao pursued rapprochement with the United States and encouraged Hanoi to reach a negotiated settlement, he tried to reassure Hanoi that Sino-American cooperation would not mean the sacriªce of North Vietnam’s interests. To underscore the point, China increased its aid to Hanoi’s war effort. Zhai Qiang’s chapter examines China’s effort to navigate the frequent changes in Cambodia’s domestic politics and foreign policy and the PRC’s policies toward Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Zhai shows that throughout the 1960s China steadfastly supported Prince Sihanouk and advised the Khmer Rouge against armed struggle. Chinese leaders feared that an escalation of conºict in Cambodia might provoke U.S. intervention and thereby undermine Chinese security and the prospects for ousting the United States from Vietnam. Only in 1971, after the Lon Nol coup and the ouster of Prince Sihanouk, did China establish direct contacts with the Khmer Rouge insur- gency in eastern Cambodia. Even then, the Chinese gave priority to their relations with Sihanouk and encouraged the Khmer Rouge to cooperate with the prince. But in 1974, after the PRC and North Vietnam began competing for inºuence in Cambo- dia, Beijing forged much closer links with the Khmer Rouge and reportedly agreed to provide the Khmer Rouge with military aid. Stephen J. Morris’s research complements recent scholarship on the impact of the Sino-Soviet conºict on China’s policy toward North Vietnam and other work on the impact of the Sino-North Vietnamese conºict on developments in Cambodia. Morris documents North Vietnam’s growing “tilt” toward the Soviet Union beginning in the late 1960s and Beijing’s corresponding anxiety about a possible threat to the PRC. He further establishes the impact of North Vietnam’s increasing cooperation with the

145

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

Soviet Union on Sino-Vietnamese relations after the uniªcation of Vietnam in 1975, including the reduction in Chinese economic assistance to Hanoi and the eventual polarization and destabilizing violence in Cambodia. A ªnal chapter, by Luu Doan Huynh, offers a Vietnamese perspective on the post-1949 evolution of China’s policy toward Vietnam. Luu offers a dispassionate analysis of Chinese policy that will resonate with the views of many Western-trained historians and political scientists. His chapter should encourage additional efforts to collaborate with Vietnamese scholars in order to enhance understanding of Hanoi’s Cold War diplomacy. Behind the Bamboo Curtain makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the Cold War and particularly to scholarship on the diplomacy of the Vietnam wars. For the most part, it establishes that the Cold War diplomacy of both North Vietnam and China was characterized by pragmatism. In so doing, it gives pause to contemporary observers who might assume that 21st-century competitors and adversaries are motivated solely by irrational ideological, religious, or cultural impulses. The book should be required reading for historians and graduate students specializing in any facet of Cold War diplomacy or contemporary East Asian security.

✣✣✣

Jim Brown, Impact Zone: The Battle of the DMZ in Vietnam, 1967–1968. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 277 pp.

Reviewed by David Ryan, University College Cork (Ireland)

Impact Zone is a personal memoir of a tour of duty in Vietnam across the politically pivotal years of 1967 and 1968. Unlike much of the memoir literature, which has mainly been written from the perspective of infantry veterans, Jim Brown’s book offers the perspective of an artillery man and therefore is quite distinct. Brown’s initial enthusiasm to be sent to the demilitarized zone (DMZ), imbued with the values tradi- tionally associated with World War II, is reºected in a series of accounts, each forming a speciªc chapter, of his many combat experiences during his tour. The chapter titles reveal Brown’s involvement in now well-known locations and battles: Ðông Hà, Con Thien, Tê´t, Cao Lu, Khe Sanh. His account juxtaposes the intense account of battle with the seemingly dreary daily routine and periods of prolonged boredom. Written in a deeply personal manner, the book is of greatest interest for those who seek to learn more about the role of artillery in the war. As such it operates within the niche of military history and memoir and will ªnd a ready audience who will gain signiªcant in- sight from this unusual military perspective. Beneath the brutality and banality of daily experience the book takes up another familiar theme of the transition of hope and pride to one of disillusion through the 13-month tour. Brown sets out from what appears almost as a mythic America ªlled with the pride and patriotism associated with the post-1945 period. He ªnishes high school after taking us through idyllic reference points—hometown life, homecoming

146

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

queens—and eventual separation. His self-acknowledged naïveté is captured in such sequences: “Hollywood exalted the American soldier with a never ending sequence of war movies. Watching John Wayne in the Sands of Iwo Jima, most of us understand- ably took it for granted that this was the way ‘red-blooded Americans’ ought to con- duct themselves. Young boys in those years could hardly avoid a respect for the military, and in my case I needed only a war to fulªll my imagination.” The reality of course was nothing like the stuff of imagination. The theme of disillusion permeates Impact Zone. Eager for action at the outset, Brown recounts his growing doubt through the midperiod of his tour. He gives a detailed sense of how some artillerymen dealt with the pervasive news of stateside dissent and the antiwar movement. Brown and his associates took seriously the criticism of the morality of the war, even though they also sensed that many of the protesters were driven by “a selªsh ‘me’ philosophy.” Although the artillerymen did not allow their growing doubts about the morality of the war to hamper their military effectiveness in life-and-death situations, the doubts lingered. As Brown testiªes, many also eventually came to realize that the war was fought not just for the values and ideals that ªlled the cultural consensus of an earlier period but also for the self-centered interests of political leaders in Washington. In this respect, Impact Zone ªts within a well-established genre assigning culpability to politicians in Washington. Through a multitude of horrendous experiences, Brown ªnishes his tour with this ever-increasing disenchantment. As he eventually rotates out of the ªeld, he visits with an incoming friend who is eager for combat and inclined to take what appears to Brown unnecessary risks. Brown admonishes his friend to be more cautious, but to little avail. Brown ultimately sees Vietnam as an unnecessary war that served only narrow political interests, but he maintains and advances distinc- tions between these criticisms and a wider patriotism. As such this is a thoroughly American story, with all attendant limitations.

✣✣✣

Robert J. Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Viet- nam, 1964–1966. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. 214 pp. $26.95.

Reviewed by Philip E. Catton, Stephen F. Austin State University

Perhaps the most glaring gap in the voluminous literature on the Vietnam War is the lack of attention to the Vietnamese side of events, without which a full understanding of the course and outcome of the conºict is impossible. South Vietnamese politics and society have received particularly short shrift from scholars of the war. In recent years, some historians, assisted by the release of archival materials in Vietnam, have begun to ªll in the void on this critical aspect of the story. Robert Topmiller’s study of Buddhist peace efforts and their challenge to the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam (GVN) is a useful contribution to this scholarly endeavor. Topmiller is a veteran of the conºict, having served in Vietnam shortly after the events he describes. He focuses, in

147

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

particular, on the Buddhist-led rebellion of 1966, which represented “the most serious non-Communist threat to the GVN in its short but tumultuous history” (p. ix). Topmiller skips quickly over the better-known Buddhist crisis of 1963, which he sees as qualitatively different from the struggle of 1964–1966. He argues that the former was primarily a response to the pro-Catholic bias of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, whereas the latter was a more wide-ranging and visceral reaction to the increasingly destructive conºict engulªng Vietnam. The escalation of the war clashed with the Buddhist tenets of compassion and nonviolence, and the growing American presence in the country seemed to threaten Vietnamese sovereignty and independence. Conse- quently, militant Buddhists felt compelled to try to stop the killing and free the country from what they viewed as neocolonial control. These concerns culminated in a Buddhist-led rebellion in the spring of 1966 involving radical monks, students, and even some soldiers from the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) who demanded the creation of an elected civilian government that would end the war by negotiating with the National Liberation Front (NLF). In the end, the rebellion failed. Topmiller attributes its defeat to a number of factors. First, the Buddhist radicals never enjoyed overwhelming popular support, even among their co-religionists. Many moderates continued to back the Saigon government and to oppose a neutralist solution. The political activism of the militants also alienated those who disapproved of such worldly engagement. Second, the rebels could not stand up to the power of the state. Backed by the Americans and the South Vietnamese ofªcer corps, Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky moved to crush the insur- rection by sending ARVN troops into the rebels’ northern strongholds of Danang and Hue. Thus, the Buddhist radicals faced several insoluble dilemmas: Their determination to challenge the Saigon regime lost them support among those who abhorred such political radicalism; and their commitment to non-violence left them vulnerable to a government prepared to use force against them. Topmiller’s book offers some valuable insights. Drawing on numerous interviews with Vietnamese involved in these events, he is able to shed new light on the hitherto rather murky motivations of the Buddhists. He clearly sympathizes with their goals, which he views as a legitimate expression of non-Communist frustration with the war. Not all commentators have been so sympathetic, however. Most recently, Mark Moyar, in Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), reiterated the charge that the NLF inªltrated the Buddhist movement and that Thich Tri Quang, the militant leader, was a Communist agent. Topmiller, who argues that little evidence exists to support these claims, offers a por- trait of the movement that seems closer to the mark. Indeed, he contends that many Buddhists, whether radicals or moderates, viewed Communism with contempt. That same sentiment characterized their feelings about the United States, and Topmiller does a good job of highlighting the troubled relationship between the Buddhists and the Americans. Their differences, he explains, stemmed from conºicting goals and outlooks. Buddhism rejected the bipolar view of the world that underlay U.S. concep- tions of the Cold War, whereas the Americans believed that the Buddhists’ naïve faith in neutralism would merely pave the way for a Communist takeover. Topmiller’s anal-

148

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

ysis of this mutual antagonism and incomprehension enables him to make some tell- ing observations about the problems that afºicted U.S. policy in Vietnam, not least the antipathy felt by many southerners toward the U.S.-backed GVN and the war that was consuming the country. Unfortunately, Topmiller’s book is too short (151 pages of text) to do justice to this neglected topic. Several key issues deserve more attention than they receive here. For example, Topmiller refers on several occasions to the rebellious ARVN soldiers who supported the Buddhists, but he tells us little about such dissidence and whether it was a widespread phenomenon. Nor do we learn enough about the Buddhist movement itself. How many monks and pagodas participated in the struggle, how did the radicals organize their resistance, and what role did they play in mobilizing support among students and soldiers? In addition, why did Vietnamese Buddhism become such an active political force at this time—why was “the Lotus unleashed”? Topmiller seeks to answer this question by focusing on the escalating war and the growing U.S. presence in South Vietnam, but he devotes little attention to the broader context that may have shaped Buddhist activism. The book would have beneªted from more discussion of such issues as the development of Buddhism during the colonial period, the impact of the 1954 partition of the country, and the energizing effects of the 1963 showdown with the Diem government. In short, Topmiller has helped to bring the Buddhist movement out of the historical shadows, but further scope for study of this important subject remains.

✣✣✣

Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1945–1950: A House Burning. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 348 pp. $39.95.

Reviewed by Dae-Sook Suh, University of Hawaii at Manoa

The Korean War is often referred to as the forgotten war, but unless one is suffering from amnesia or some such abnormalities, how can anyone forget a war that killed more than two million people and that has never been permanently settled? The Ko- rean War is certainly not forgotten. In addition to the voluminous scholarly works to remind us of the conºict, some of the formerly classiªed Communist records from the war were released after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even the governments of North and South Korea have published their own historical accounts of the war. South Korea put out a six-volume study in 1977, and a revised version of the ofªcial history was published in three volumes in 1997–1999. North Korea published an account with a more illustrious title, The History of the Just Fatherland Liberation War of the Korean People Led by the Great Supreme Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung in three volumes to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the war in 1993. Today, nearly 55 years after the conclusion of the truce on the battleªeld in July 1953, new works on the war continue to appear. The book under review is the latest study by a distinguished military historian

149

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

Allan R. Millett, who is Raymond E. Mason, Jr., Professor of Military History at Ohio State University and director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Or- leans. He is the author of, among numerous other works, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1991) and co-author of A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). His new book on the Korean War comes in two volumes, the ªrst covering the period from the liberation in August 1945 to June 1950 and the second covering the period from May 1950 to 1954. In describing events leading to the war, Millett reviews a series of political upheavals and the measures taken in response by the U.S. occupation forces, particularly the roles of the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) and of the South Korean authorities in suppressing dissidents and facilitating the establishment of a new government in the Korean peninsula. He begins his review with the 1st of March uprising in 1919, but searching for the roots of the war so far back in the Japa- nese colonial period seems a bit far-fetched. Millett covers the familiar ground of political conºicts in liberated Korea, but the strength of his book lies not in his depiction of the Korean scene or his reassessment of the political upheavals and armed revolts but in his analysis of the role of the U.S. military in the occupation of Korea. The book focuses primarily on the operations of the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG). The Soviet and American military generals in the opposing camps of the Cold War were important in creating two governments and consolidating the division of the peninsula. Military ofªcers negotiated the question of independence for nearly two years in the U.S.-USSR Joint Commission that tried, for example, to implement the 5-year trusteeship agreed at the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Decem- ber 1945. When the commission’s efforts failed, the United States sought the help of the newly created United Nations (UN) to solve the ªrst serious problems of peace after World War II. The security of the Korean peninsula, particularly the public’s safety in the south- ern half, was one of the major concerns of the USAMGIK. During the three years from liberation in 1945 to the establishment of the Republic of Korea in August 1948, the USAMGIK was challenged many times by the right-wing nationalist groups demanding rapid independence and the left-wing groups with their ideological ties to the North. Politicians of all persuasions made demands on the occupation authorities, and violent uprisings and armed riots were common occurrences. Millett explains the role of the U.S. military in the creation of the Korean armed forces and the Korean National Constabulary that helped to suppress the dissidents. Descriptions of intelligence operations by the U.S. military and the use of right-wing intelligence or- ganizations such as Paeguisa (Paikyisa in the book) are interesting and revealing. An Tu-hui, the notorious assassin of Kim Ku, was a member of the Paeguisa, and An in- sisted that he acted on the order of Yom Ung-t’aek (also known as Yom Tong-jin), the head of the organization. Millett’s extensive use of U.S. National Archives sources is commendable. He supplemented these materials with archival materials from the Truman and Eisen- hower libraries, the papers of John Foster Dulles, and materials produced by the U.S.

150

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

Congress. He also used UN documentary sources to trace the work of the UN Tem- porary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK). Most notable is his use of archival materials from the U.S. War Department, the Department of the Army, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Central In- telligence Agency. He seems to have exhausted the relevant Record Group documents of important commanders in the KMAG, USAMGIK, the US 24th Corps, and the U.S. Armed Forces in Korea, including those of Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, Major Gen. John B. Coulter, and Brig. Gen. William L. Roberts. The intricate maneuvers of the U.S. troop withdrawal in June 1949 are especially well-documented, and it is interesting to read General Roberts’s bold but inaccurate prediction as late as March 1949 that the newly created South Korean army could defend the South against a North Korean attack. Political turmoil continued in the South even after the UNTCOK established a government with a general election in May and the proclamation of a new republic, the Republic of Korea (ROK), in August 1948. The problem was that the ROK government was not one that the people wanted. Although the population in the South did not want a Communist regime, many were hoping for a single, independent government throughout the peninsula. General strikes erupted in February and March 1948, and on 3 April 1948, South Korean Communists in Chejudo staged a large uprising, known as the Cheju 4-3 Incident. In October 1948, the South Korean constabulary in Yosu and Sunch’on revolted against the newly established ROK government. Alluding to these political protests, Millett argues that the Korean War started in February–October 1948. Later he states more speciªcally that the war started in April 1948 as a classic example of “people’s war.” (p. 135) His most precise starting point comes in his discussion of the Cheju 4-3 Incident. In that section he maintains that the Korean War started on 3 April 1948. Nowadays we know that the Cheju 4-3 Inci- dent was organized by a local Chejudo guerrilla named Kim Tal-sam and his fellow Communists afªliated with Namnodang (the Workers’ Party of South Korea, translated in the book as the South Korean Labor Party). In that sense, the Cheju 4-3 Inci- dent was not a prelude to the Korean War and certainly was not the starting point of the war. The incident was not part of North Korea’s grandiose scheme for the Just Fatherland Liberation War of the Korean People. Millett contends that selecting a starting date for the war “is a matter of judgment” (p. 2). The problem with his choice of 3 April 1948 is not so much that it is a bad judgment and confuses the period or duration of the war but that it fails to distin- guish the South Korean security problems from North Korean war preparations. Also, his choice of a starting point implies that the North Korean Communists had direct control or inºuence over most of the South Korean anti-government insurgencies and uprisings. In reality, Kim Il Sung and his followers had relatively little control over the South Korean Communists and the Workers’ Party of South Korea (WPSK). Con- trary to what Millett claims, Kim Il Sung was not even the chairman or general secretary (p. 51) of the Workers’ Party of North Korea (WPNK). The WPSK was headed not by Pak Hon-yong but by Ho Hon. Even after the merger of the two parties to form the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) under the chairmanship of Kim Il Sung in

151

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

June 1949, the Central Committees of the merged parties were kept separate, with separate operations. After the two parties were united, the WPK held joint plenums of the Central Committees until December 1953, long after the conclusion of the war. Furthermore, Millett himself points out (rightly) that the South Korean government with U.S. military assistance “won” (p. 221) the campaign against the WPSK long before the start of the war. Millett uses three different transliteration systems of Korean into English for doz- ens of personal names and place names. The correct use of one system throughout the book would have been preferable and much simpler. Millett does include a useful bib- liographic essay on the sources relating to the Korean War. Overall, this book is a valuable addition to the literature on the Korean War, and Millett has contributed signiªcantly to our understanding of the operation of the KMAG.

✣✣✣

Harold Lloyd Goodall, Jr., A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006. 399 pp.

Reviewed by John Prados, National Security Archive

A Need to Know is disappointing both for what it alludes to but does not deliver and for what it shows of the potential sufferings of the families of those who labor in the gardens of secrecy at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other entities of the shadows. Harold Goodall, Jr., a proliªc author and professor of communications at Arizona State University, the son of a CIA ofªcial, grew up in ignorance of his father’s real work. As a little boy he lived in places like Rome, London, Cheyenne (at White- man Air Force Base), and Philadelphia, too young to understand much of what was going on around him. Goodall’s inheritance after his father’s death was a diary (stolen before he could make use of it) that reveals his father’s secret line of work, mentioning ªgures like Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, William Colby, James J. Angleton, Kim Philby, and William Harvey, among others, a combination of people no one could ac- cidentally meet on the street. Goodall eventually sets out to uncover his dad’s real life, and this book is the result. Not inclined to cooperate, the CIA released no records to Goodall, and he was unable to locate and speak to any of his father’s former colleagues. Goodall was ªnally limited to what he could discover from family and friends—which unfortunately was nothing of substance. All it amounts to is the elder Goodall’s tale of a night drinking with Philby, recited years later in a group therapy session, plus the dummy ªle of per- sonnel records the government compiled to sustain a cover as U.S. consul and an em- ployee of the Veterans Administration. This makes for a story of pure speculation— his father could have done this, he might have been mixed up in that—supplemented by more general observations about the CIA drawing on secondary sources. The only item in the book based on direct observation is Goodall’s account of how the U.S. ambassador to Rome, Claire Booth Luce, greeted his mother with a devastating put-

152

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

down when the Goodalls arrived in the Italian capital. Goodall also suspects that James Angleton attended his father’s burial service—the tall, angular man standing in the rain beside a car on the other side of the road—but he neither met nor spoke to that man. Hence, this, too, is only speculation. The book is really the story of a frus- trating and ultimately unsuccessful journey of discovery and would have been better cast that way. Though unsatisfying as a biography (whether of a family or an individual), A Need to Know is disturbing in another way. The book underscores the pernicious effect of secrecy on the son. In this regard it bears similarity to another recent account by a CIA son, John H. Richardson’s My Father the Spy: An Investigative Memoir (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). Richardson, unlike Goodall, knew for sure that his father worked for the agency based on a paper trail, a few colleagues, and many accounts of his father’s exploits in South Vietnam or the Philippines—all of which were signiªcant advantages when documenting his father’s life. But both books show the void in children’s lives caused by a father who lives in the shadows, doing things they must not know, going to places they cannot visit, likely to be called away at any time. A few books have been published by CIA ofªcers’ spouses, who seem to have done a better job on balance, perhaps because they were older, understood more, and (in principle) had some say in whether to sign on or not. Up to now, these social costs of the Cold War—and the shadow war that underlay it—have scarcely been explored or taken into account. In such a rendering, works like A Need to Know will ªnd their true value.

✣✣✣

Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger. Prince- ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 241 pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by David C. Engerman, Brandeis University

Scholars who believe that they are better suited to make policy than to study it should read Bruce Kuklick’s Blind Oracles. Over almost a dozen short chapters, Kuklick traces how intellectuals served (and eventually became) the foreign policy establishment and highlights the wide gap between intellectuals’ perceived and actual roles in policy formation as well as the limits of their analyses. Kuklick opens the book with an excellent, if condensed, discussion of the philosophical currents of the interwar years, especially the schools of thought associated with John Dewey on the one hand and logical positivists on the other. He then shows how policy intellectuals after World War II drew selectively from these ideas to valorize scientiªc rigor and value-neutral rationality rather than deliberation about ultimate aims. Although the next chapter deals with George Kennan, Kuklick’s main concerns lie elsewhere, with the mathematically oriented social scientists at the RAND Corporation. Starting in the late 1940s, RAND’s impressive group of intellectuals (including Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, and Albert Wohlstetter) began to make the case that questions of war, and especially nuclear war, should be subjected to

153

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

models and not morals. RAND theorists bluntly dismissed other approaches, treating even their patron, the U.S. Air Force, with “patronizing arrogance” (p. 23). RAND’s modus operandi was that of a modeler, focusing on decision points abstracted from historical, bureaucratic, or psychological circumstances. Roberta Wohlstetter’s famous study of Pearl Harbor dealt only with methods of intelligence rather than the conºicts that led to the war in the ªrst place (p. 59). Similarly, RAND’s focus on rational deci- sions by rational actors left them theorizing with an “impoverished, predictable, and cramped psyche” (p. 29). The end results, unsurprisingly, worked better on paper than in practice. After more than a decade of criticizing military decision-making, RAND intellectuals rose to power in the 1960s. Installed in Robert McNamara’s Pentagon, they continued to apply sophisticated techniques—and to give short shrift to history, context, and ultimate goals. As good consultants, they could answer questions about the most appropriate means to meet speciªc aims; but as policymakers they were unready to debate these aims. At the same time that some policy intellectuals left RAND to take up jobs at the Pentagon, a different group of them left Cambridge, Massachusetts, to head to the White House and the State Department. Kuklick deals only brieºy with the “best and the brightest”—McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and others—who have already been covered at great length by other historians. Instead, Kuklick focuses on a group led by political scientist Richard Neustadt at Harvard University, who sought to analyze bureaucratic politics and bargaining. Neustradt’s instant analyses of the Cuban missile crisis and the Skybolt controversy in 1962 took for granted American aims and focused on management techniques. The Harvard and RAND groups began to converge on the question of Vietnam. McNamara may have come up with the idea for the Pentagon Papers—eventually completed as a RAND study—after visiting Harvard’s new Kennedy School of Gov- ernment. The RAND analysts who compiled the report were wary of ªckle popular opinion but not their own cognitive blinders. They concluded that the fault lay with democratic politics, not faulty advice or bad policy (i.e., the policies undertaken by RAND’s own “consumers”). Blind Oracles ends, ªttingly, with Henry Kissinger and some of his former Har- vard colleagues in 1971. The scholars, representing both the RAND and the Harvard approaches, called for Kissinger’s resignation. The irony of the conversation was that Kissinger ªt precisely the models of his critics. Kissinger was, according to Kuklick, “the best embodiment of the rational-action model.” For Neustadt, the author of books cataloguing the deformities of bureaucratic policies, who could be a better stu- dent than Kissinger (pp. 201–202)? The attacks on Kissinger were motivated more by an attempt to ªnd blame for ineffective policies than by a consistent application of sophisticated models. Expertise became a “pawn” (p. 225) in power struggles; experts gained power through “feats of ventriloquy” (p. 16). The ªnal page of the book compares the slick rationality of RAND theorists to “shamanistic” knowledge and highlights one crowning irony among many: “the best traits to be inculcated into spe-

154

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

cialists are humility and prudence, just the traits that vanish with their education and growth in expertise” (p. 240). Blind Oracles is a major accomplishment that Kuklick is uniquely qualiªed to write. He brings philosophical sophistication to topics usually treated as bureaucratic inªghting or policy disputation. He takes the policy intellectuals seriously (even if not quite as seriously as they took themselves), looking thoughtfully and insightfully at their wellsprings and their ideas, not just their inºuence. He turns his skepticism into a powerful tool criticizing several schools of “action intellectuals.” (This skepticism carries over into sharp commentary on previous scholarly interpretations.) In the end, Kuklick offers a cautionary tale, sweeping in its condemnation yet deep and thoughtful in its textual readings. The individuals discussed in Blind Oracles may be deeply ºawed, but the book itself is a model of how scholars can and should think about policy.

✣✣✣

Steven Usdin, Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 328 pp.

Reviewed by Harvey Klehr, Emory University

Steven Usdin’s remarkable book sheds light on the story of Soviet espionage in Amer- ica, the development of the Soviet computer industry, and the structural and cultural factors that contributed to the USSR’s inability to match American technological and scientiªc progress. In addition to being a fascinating account of the stranger-than- ªction lives of two American spies, the book is well-documented and well-written, de- serving of far more attention than it has yet garnered. Usdin met a mysterious but charming English-speaking Soviet scientist in 1990 while doing research on technology transfer in Moscow. Not until several months later did Usdin discover that he had become friends with Joel Barr, an American-born engineer who had once been associated with Julius Rosenberg and had vanished around the time that the Rosenberg spy ring was exposed. Until Barr’s death in 1998, Usdin met frequently with him, and Barr occasionally stayed with the Usdins in Maryland. Engineering Communism is based on extensive interviews with Barr, on Barr’s ªle at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), on interviews with family and co-workers from Czechoslovakia and Russia, and on important documents that have emerged from both Russian and American archives since the end of the Cold War, including the Venona papers (decrypted Soviet intelligence cables from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s). The result is a historical excavation that no one could have expected. Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant were on the fringes of the Rosenberg case in the early 1950s. Although their names did not come up prominently or publicly, insiders knew that both men had disappeared, and the FBI suspected that they had ºed to the Soviet bloc. Barr had grown up in New York in an impoverished Jewish family and had be-

155

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

come a Communist while still in high school. At City College of New York he formed a tight bond with fellow Communists and engineering students like Julius Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, and William Perl, all of whom became spies for the USSR. In 1939, a year after graduation, Barr began a series of jobs with the U.S. government and defense contractors. At Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, while working for the U.S. Signal Corps, Barr befriended Al Sarant, the son of Greek immigrants and also a Commu- nist. By 1942 the two of them were sources for the ring of spies headed by Julius Rosenberg. Barr was ªred the same year when investigators uncovered his Communist past, but he quickly found a position with Western Electric, which hired him to work on classiªed projects without ever checking with his old employers. Sarant soon joined him. The two friends made plans to start a business producing military technology after the war but were never able to persuade the government to fund any of their ideas. Barr was also interested in music, took classes in composition, and considered pursuing it as a career. When Sperry Gyroscope ªred him in 1947 after he lost his security clearance, Barr obtained a passport and went to France to study music. By the time the Venona messages revealing his espionage were decrypted by U.S. analysts, he was beyond the reach of American law enforcement. Barr had vanished immediately after the arrest in 1950 of David Greenglass, who knew about Barr’s espionage work. Soviet foreign intelligence agents whisked him to Czechoslovakia, where he became Joe Berg from Johannesburg, South Africa and worked for an electronics company. In 1951 he was reunited with Sarant, who had ºed from the United States after eluding the FBI. Sarant traveled with his lover, a next-door neighbor. Both of them had abandoned their spouses and children. Barr and Sarant worked for ªve years in Prague on computer systems for military use. Their lives were privileged but uneasy. The Soviet Union had provided their covers through Rudolf Slánský, the Czechoslovak Communist leader whose removal and execution in the early 1950s brought occasional trouble for the two foreigners for whom he had vouched. Their American-style work habits and outspokenness also caused resentment. Barr married a Czech woman whose father despised Communists and Jews. Nonetheless, Barr’s and Sarant’s scientiªc and technological achievements were impressive. They developed the ªrst computer-controlled antiaircraft battery in the Soviet bloc, and in 1956 the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) moved them to the USSR. They were put in charge of a special laboratory (Sarant was chief designer and Barr chief engineer) and given large salaries and the authority to recruit employees. The two men designed and built microelectronics equipment, worked with well-known ªgures such as the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, and developed an innovative and powerful new computer for military use. They took risks at their laboratory but achieved a variety of technological and organizational successes, attracted powerful patrons, and won major awards including the Order of the Red Banner. Barr and Sarant’s most audacious idea was to develop a Soviet “scientiªc city” outside Moscow. When Nikita Khrushchev visited their laboratory in 1962, Sarant briefed him and won his endorsement, leading to the building of Zelenograd, the So-

156

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

viet Silicon Valley, which remained a closed city until after the collapse of the USSR. Despite this achievement, Barr and Sarant had overreached. Their laboratory in Le- ningrad had numerous Jewish employees, giving local Communist Party ofªcials a pretext for accusing them of Zionism. Nativists appalled by the prominent role given to two foreigners distrusted them, and bureaucrats threatened by their organizational innovations undermined them. When Sarant was named only the associate director of the new scientiªc center, he wrote an appeal to Khrushchev, but unfortunately for him and Barr, it came just before the Soviet leader was deposed. When the new Soviet leaders learned of the appeal, they denounced Sarant and Barr for a variety of alleged errors and sins and sent them back to Leningrad. Although Barr’s and Sarant’s laboratory achieved some minor successes, their rapid rise in the scientiªc bureaucracy had come to an end. In 1973 they were removed from their positions altogether. Sarant moved to Vladivostok to work on artiªcial intelligence and continue his futile campaign to win membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He died of a heart attack in 1979. Barr live a more unconventional life. He carried on a long-time affair with another woman, fathering several children, until his wife learned of his deception and divorced him. His apartment in Leningrad became a salon for those interested in Western music. Despite all his heresies, he remained a loyal Communist, delighting in his admission to the Soviet Communist Party in 1966. When he was ªnally identiªed as Joel Barr in the late 1980s, he returned periodically to the United States, successfully applied for Social Security payments, and avoided prosecution because the statute of limitations on his crimes had run out. Steve Usdin has splendidly illuminated one of the most unusual lives of the twentieth century.

✣✣✣

G. Edward White, Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass War: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 297 pp. $30.00.

Reviewed by Eduard Mark, U.S. Department of the Air Force

G. Edward White, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Virginia, has written what is in some respects the most interesting of the long line of books devoted to Alger Hiss, the diplomat, spy, and—to some—martyr. What distinguishes this work from its predecessors is White’s plausible reconstruction of Hiss’s internal life. White devotes little effort to establishing Hiss’s guilt. Although the book does review the evidence bearing on that question, White’s position is essentially that one may safely regard the matter as settled, for neither Hiss himself nor his defenders have ever succeeded in refuting the evidence that led to his conviction. Just how, for example, could Whittaker Chambers have obtained extracts of diplomatic cables written over a span of several months in Hiss’s hand without Hiss’s complicity? Why would the diplomat have prepared summaries of documents pertaining to military matters that bore no relation to his work for the Department of State but that surely would have inter-

157

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

ested his putative second employer, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence organization (GRU)? And could the FBI really have created a typewriter cable that perfectly duplicated the famous Woodstock when all subsequent efforts to create such a Dop- pelgänger have failed? White is content to apply Occam’s Razor to the matter of Hiss’s guilt and to move on to more interesting questions. What particularly fascinates him as an attor- ney is the strange shift in fortunes Hiss experienced after being released from prison in 1954. Although no exculpatory evidence ever appeared, and Hiss’s original defense remained as improbable as ever, he had by the 1970s convinced a sizable portion of the public that he was an American Dreyfus, framed and falsely convicted. How was this possible? White ªnds a clue in Hiss’s extraordinary behavior in 1948 after Chambers testiªed before Congress that Hiss had been a Communist in the 1930s. In this initial testimony, Chambers had refrained from disclosing that Hiss had been a spy as well. Hiss never would have come to trial had he not rashly decided to sue Chambers for libel. That ill-considered action left the impoverished Chambers no recourse but to make public the documents he had kept as a “life preserver” against possible revenge by the GRU—documents showing that Hiss had been a Soviet spy as well as the Com- munist whom Chambers had reluctantly described to the congressional investigators. White might have contented himself with the observation that this chain of events put paid to the conspiratorial theories adduced over the past half-century by credulous partisans to explain Hiss’s indictment for perjury after he had denied having known Chambers as Chambers. (Under the pressure of mounting evidence, Hiss grudgingly acknowledged that he had known Chambers as a panhandler named “George Crosley” who was recognizable by his bad teeth, which Hiss condescendingly examined as one might the mouth of a horse.) But White, declining to belabor the obvious, ªnds in the ªrst days of Hiss’s misadventure clues to both his downfall and his ephemeral redemption: his ability to deceive and manipulate others. White cites evidence early in Hiss’s life of intellectual gifts as well as “self-control and self- fashioning” (p. 10). These traits served him well as a person who thrived on deceit and deception. White detects early signs of these characteristics in Hiss’s repeated manipu- lations of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes when Hiss worked as the justice’s secretary (pp. 20, 23–25). Hiss was a man of many accomplishments who possessed some virtues. But these accomplishments and virtues were, in White’s view, the instruments of his deceptions. Elegant and self-possessed, Hiss resorted to what White calls a “reputational defense” when confronted by Chambers. In effect, Hiss said look at me and see a distinguished citizen for whom the great and good vouch; look at Chambers and see a scruffy denizen of the demimonde, an epicene fantasist, a former Commu- nist and spy by admission. Hiss played the role of an outranged innocent well but ultimately was undone by another trait that White also discerns in his early life: reck- lessness. Hiss had failed to consider the rather obvious possibility that Chambers had retained evidence of his past connections with Hiss and the GRU. The reputational defense failed in the court of law but with time succeeded bril- liantly in the court of public opinion as Americans forgot what little they had known about the facts presented at Hiss’s trial in 1950. The quondam diplomat played the

158

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

role of martyr well, insisting calmly and without bitterness that he was innocent. Par- ticularly after the disgrace of Hiss’s arch-nemesis Richard Nixon in 1974, much of the public was willing to entertain the idea that Hiss had indeed been framed and rail- roaded by Tricky Dick. Hiss by then had become a hero of sorts to liberals and appeared frequently in academic settings. (I myself once heard the somewhat prissy Hiss relate how Anthony Eden, surprised at the pissoir by Josif Stalin at Yalta, had “be- smirched” himself.) But the reputational defense was inherently fragile. It ultimately rested on a tightly focused juxtaposition of Hiss with the unseemly Chambers, whose own truthfulness was justly suspect. The charade began to crumble when Allen Weinstein relentlessly revisited the original evidence in his book Perjury: The Hiss Chambers Case (New York: Knopf, 1978), and the remaining shreds of Hiss’s credibil- ity vanished after the Venona papers (decrypted intercepts of Soviet espionage cables) and a stream of documents from Russia and Eastern Europe amply conªrmed Cham- bers’s testimony, thus depriving Hiss’s defenders of their most effective tactic, the in- vidious comparison of Chambers with the American Dreyfus. The most interesting aspect of White’s book is its reconstruction of Hiss’s inner life. White offers a plausible explanation of why Hiss became a Communist and why, after being exposed as a spy, he maintained his innocence so steadfastly. White invokes the psychological concept of integration, which he deªnes as the need of an individual for a “‘sense of completeness,’ self-fulªllment, and inner peace” (p. 247). Before Hiss was exposed, he satisªed those needs by serving Communism, seeing himself as a champion of a better future for mankind—a self-image that appealed to his genuine altruism, a virtue that even Chambers emphasized in his portrayal of Hiss in Witness (New York: Random House, 1952). If Hiss had confessed and gone through the required humiliating rituals of contrition, he would in all probability have escaped prosecution. (The statute of limitations on his espionage had expired, and his conviction for perjury would not have occurred had he not threatened to sue Chambers as part of his imposture of innocence.) But Hiss would then have been just another shabby exposed traitor, a sort of up-scale Julian Wadleigh, bereft of his sense of self-worth. By denying any guilt, Hiss retained his amour propre and continued to serve the cause of Communism. His convincing protestations of innocence implicitly impugned the American system of justice and for two generations helped to persuade many intellectuals that anti-Communism was tantamount to the witch hunts of the seventeenth century. (Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible to instruct those who were slow to see the parallel.) With this “narrative of innocence” Hiss not only rendered a ªnal service to the cause for which he had sacriªced so much but was able to continue seeing himself “as an integrated personality who had led a complete life”—still a master spy, still a paladin of a better future for oppressed mankind (pp. 247–248). The “narrative of innocence” conferred yet another beneªt. By means of it he protected his friends and family from the truth of his treason and could thus perversely see himself as the pro- tector of those he had deceived. I mean no criticism of White when I suggest that other considerations, not in- trinsically incompatible with those he has proposed, might also have led Hiss to cleave with such relentless consistency to his “narrative of innocence.” Hiss was still a rela-

159

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

tively young man when he left jail and had to decide how to spend the rest of his life. Like so many who had served the cause of a better future, he knew enough about the tumbledown abattoir where that future had tangibly appeared—the Soviet Union—to be certain that he did not actually want to live there. Better to save that joy for future generations! But how then to continue on in America? Failing a successful appeal of his conviction, he was barred from every professional role to which he might aspire. If, upon his release, he had confessed, he would have forfeited every chance of a successful appeal and been despised all around. But by professing his innocence he retained both the hope of such an appeal and the trust of those who continued to believe in him. While thus maintaining his inner identiªcation as a soldier of Communism, he also created for himself the welcoming and supportive milieu that sustained him to the end of his days.

✣✣✣

David Everitt, A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. xvi ϩ 411 pp.

Reviewed by Paul Hollander, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

This book is a reminder that the Cold War was not merely a political and quasi- military conºict between the superpowers but also a source of deep cultural and social cleavages within American society. These cleavages were manifested by, among other things, the remarkable swings of public (and elite) opinion about the Soviet Union and its supporters. During and immediately after World War II, the wartime alliance shaped these perceptions and attitudes, which found expression even in Hollywood movies that combined admiration of the Soviet system with breathtaking ignorance about it. Earlier, during the 1930s, many inºuential intellectuals and artists were enthusiastic about the Soviet system and inclined to join the slavishly pro-Soviet American Communist Party (CPUSA). The Soviet imposition of control over Eastern Europe after the war led to a revi- sion of these attitudes. As the Berlin blockade and the Korean War further intensiªed the Cold War, the pendulum swung to an intense, sometimes irrational anti- Communism. The latter found its major and most notorious expression in McCarthyism, loyalty oaths, congressional hearings, and the blacklisting of Commu- nists and Communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry. Among the important (though often not well-known) protagonists in this conºict were former agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—Kenneth Bierley, John Keenan, and Theodore Kirkpatrick—who were associated with “red-hunting” publications such as Counterattack: The Newsletter of Facts on Communism and Red Channel. Those under attack included ªgures such as John Henry Faulk who had been a prominent “radio personality” and who in 1962 successfully sued for libel Laurence Johnson and Vin- cent Hartnett, other anti-Communist vigilantes of the period. The swing of the pendulum from anti-Communism to anti-anti-Communism

160

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

came with the protest movements of the 1960s and the rise of the New Left, which, although different from the old, pro-Soviet left, subscribed to many of the same basic values and beliefs. Anti-anti-Communists considered anti-Communism a greater menace and far more distasteful than Communism. Supporters of the American Communist movement came to be seen and portrayed not as stooges of Moscow but as idealistic ªghters for social justice and as human beings of great warmth. This, for example, was the portrayal of them in Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Over time, the ravages of McCarthyism acquired an aura of unprecedented state terror, the darkest chapter in recent American history, routinely compared to the Soviet Great Terror of the 1930s (as in CNN’s documentary on “The Cold War” in 1998). Alongside the Vietnam War, the anti- Communist fervor of the late 1940s and 1950s had the ironic (and regrettable) effect of discrediting anti-Communism among intellectuals and the educated public. There are two explanations of why the entertainment industry, radio and television included, became a major battleªeld of these political ideas and attitudes. Popular entertainers, especially those associated with the Hollywood ªlm industry were, by and large, liberal or left-of-center. Some were Communists or Communist sympathizers. But the great concern with the political attitudes of entertainers can be understood only by reference to the enormous importance of the entertainment industry in American society. Most Americans know far more about popular entertainers (including athletes) than about any other occupational group. These entertainers’ lifestyles, including political beliefs and activities, are given more publicity than the lifestyles of any other group. The visibility of the entertainment industry in American society helps to explain why the industry became so politicized and why so much attention was paid to the political attitudes of those within it. Even today, when members of Congress hold hearings about certain matters, they often respectfully solicit the pro- nouncements of celebrity entertainers regardless of their level of knowledge. David Everitt addresses these issues in A Shadow of Red. The book is not only thorough and well documented, it also is remarkably judicious and even-handed, especially considering the heated emotions surrounding these controversies. Although Everitt has no sympathy whatsoever for blacklisting and readily acknowledges the damage it inºicted on free expression and public discourse, he refrains from idealizing those who were targeted. He notes, “Targets of the blacklist, even those who admitted being part of the Communist movement, have often been portrayed as nothing more than idealistic progressives...asifcommunism in the age of Stalin were nothing more than liberalism with an attitude. Often they have been touted as political and cultural heroes” (p. xiii). Many of these idealists, Everitt writes, managed to support “one of the most vi- cious and destructive dictators in history” (p. 347). He adds: “There was rigidity and extremism on both sides....Thedanger to free speech at one time resided on the left, when Communists smeared all their opponents, attempted to stiºe debate and en- forced thought control within their own ranks. And then it emerged full-blown on the opposite side of the spectrum when anti-Communists employed tactics all too remi- niscent of their enemy” (pp. 347–348).

161

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021 Book Reviews

The case of Paul Robeson was emblematic of these polarized attitudes. Unlike many on the right who detested Robeson, his admirers blithely overlooked his unwa- vering loyalty to the Soviet Union under Josif Stalin and his deluded insistence later on “that the Hungarian revolt [of 1956] was ‘not a true rising of the people,’ only an insidious American instigated plot” (p. 242). Equally revealing of attitudes on the left at the time was the case of an anthropologist at Columbia University, Gene Weltªsh, who supported the worldwide disinformation campaign about U.S. germ warfare during the Korean War (p. 115). Beginning in the 1960s the powerful and durable backlash against blacklisting and the anti-Communist campaigns of the McCarthy period found expression in the writings of David Caute, Stefan Kanfer, Lillian Hellman, Victor Navasky, Larry Ceplar, Steven Englund, and many others. All of them shared the belief that “the blacklist grew out of groundless hysteria. They tended to belittle the designs of the CPUSA and its involvement in furthering espionage and agents of inºuence” (p. 341). Movies about the same topic conveyed an image of those blacklisted as “lov- able, quirky iconoclasts.” (p. 342). A 1998 documentary titled Scandalize My Name maintained that the blacklist “targeted anyone who spoke out against racism” (p. 342). The reinvigorated leftist orientation of the entertainment industry was also reºected at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1975 when “producer Bert Schneider read aloud a message of greetings from the Vietcong ambassador.” Two years later, at another Academy Award celebration, Lillian Hellman “took the stage and received the evening’s only standing ovation” (p. 343). More recently major ªgures of the entertainment world, such as Harry Belafonte, Steven Spielberg, and Oliver Stone, have made no secret of their admiration of Fidel Castro and the system he created in Cuba (p. 343). The book ends on an optimistic note: “While the blacklist itself chipped away at civil libertarian values, the specter of the blacklist in more recent years might have played a role in preventing similar excesses....[T]he1950s experience sensitized people to the potential for repression” (p. 348). Regrettably, this is not exactly the case. In the academic and cultural world, the rise of political correctness has imposed new re- strictions on free expression. Speech codes, sensitivity training, and the groundless and routine attribution of racism and sexism have become institutionalized since the early 1970s, indicating once more that intolerance is a hardy perennial.

✣✣✣

ERRATUM On p. 142 of the Winter 2008 issue of the journal, a typesetting error resulted in the duplication of a paragraph in the book review by John Prados. The superºuous paragraph should have been deleted but was not when the review was transferred from the Fall 2007 issue to the Winter 2008 issue.

162

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.157 by guest on 28 September 2021