Book Reviews

mestic or even international economic policies, the country was a strategic ally of the United States, whereas the Soviet Union was a geopolitical and ideological adversary after the war. Hearden’s determination to prove the revisionist thesis limits the value of his study in other places. Many scholars, including prominent revisionists, would dispute Hearden’s claim that the “foreign policy of the United States did not undergo any fun- damental change when Roosevelt died and [Harry] Truman moved into the White House” (p. 314). It is hard to square the statement that in 1933 “Roosevelt shared” the State Department’s “internationalist outlook” if we bear in mind the president’s ef- fort to sabotage the London Economic Conference, a meeting called to halt the world’s descent into economic nationalism. Hearden also seems unaware of the de- cades-old work of Marc Trachtenberg, Stephen Schuker, and Walter McDougall on the reparations question and Germany. It was the British, not the French, who inºated the reparations numbers, and, contrary to Hearden’s assertions, Woodrow Wilson did little to stop them. Furthermore, the reparations issue revolved around a political question—the willingness of Germany to pay—as opposed to a purely eco- nomic question, the capacity to pay. Finally, the link between economic depression and war is not clear-cut. Both the United States and the Soviet Union faced tremen- dous economic pressures in the 1930s. But instead of expanding, both giants turned inward and isolationist, with dangerous results. Most important, the new world order that emerged after World War II bore little resemblance to the vision espoused by the American “architects.” The British failed in their attempts to make sterling convertible and maintained many of their imperial preferences. Japan and West Germany reemerged as economic powers behind protec- tionist trade barriers and monetary controls. With U.S. encouragement, the European Economic Community was built explicitly to discriminate against American goods. In many ways, the postwar order was far less “globalist” than the international environ- ment of the 1920s or the decades preceding World War I. Hearden provides an excel- lent insight into the debates within the U.S. government regarding plans for a “new world order,” but he is far less convincing in showing the actual implementation.

✣✣✣

Robert Dallek, An Unªnished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. 838 pp. $30.00.

Reviewed by Fred I. Greenstein, Princeton University

John F. Kennedy would stand high on any ranking of political leaders whose personal qualities helped shape the Cold War. His ªnger was on the American nuclear button during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, a confrontation that could have de- stroyed hundreds of millions of lives and could have eroded the habitability of most of the planet. Kennedy’s advisers were sharply divided about whether to give Soviet lead-

169

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2005.7.3.169 by guest on 26 September 2021 Book Reviews

ers the option of withdrawing the missiles they had secretly installed in Cuba or to launch an air strike on the missile sites, a course of action that might well have trig- gered a nuclear war. The buck stopped with Kennedy, who opted for the less draco- nian alternative and, unbeknownst to many of his advisers, secretly assured Moscow that his administration would accede to its demand to withdraw U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The Kennedy who emerges from Robert Dallek’s biography is of interest to stu- dents of the Cold War in that he proves to have been neither the anti-Communist ideologue depicted in such works as Thomas G. Patterson’s edited collection Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), nor the violence-prone devotee of machismo to be found in writings such as Thomas C. Reeves’s A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (New York: Free Press, 1991). Dallek portrays a JFK who was clear-headed, undogmatic, and intent on preventing the Cold War from turning hot. Dallek is closely attentive to Kennedy’s sexual promiscuity, the truly parlous state of his health, and his heavy reliance on medications, but he argues that they did not impair the president’s perfor- mance in ofªce. One might have hoped that in addition to being instructive on Kennedy himself, Dallek’s book would be a useful history of Soviet-American relations during the Ken- nedy presidency. It is not. The book’s shortcomings are illuminated by setting it against the analysis in a volume on which Dallek frequently draws: Michael R. Beschloss’s The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991). Beschloss argues that the Kennedy years were marked by a mounting spiral of misperception and hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union that began when Kennedy mistakenly concluded that Nikita Khrushchev’s address on 6 January 1961 to Communist Party activists calling for “wars of national liberation” was the prelude to Soviet expansionism. (It appears to have been mainly an attempt by the Soviet leader to counter Chinese criticism of his policies.) Kennedy responded on 30 January 1961 with an apocalyptic address to Congress in which he warned that “we grow nearer the hour of maximum danger” and re- quested a major arms increase—a speech that drew harsh criticism in the Soviet press. The negative effect on Moscow of Kennedy’s speech was intensiªed by the Kennedy administration’s abortive effort to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro by landing a brigade of anti-Castro exiles at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in April 1961. This effort reinforced Khrushchev’s view of Kennedy’s hostile intentions, but the U.S. administration’s fail- ure to do what was necessary to remove Castro suggested that the new U.S. president lacked the will to follow through on his anti-Communist principles. Emboldened by Kennedy’s seeming weakness, Khrushchev bullied him during their June 1961 meeting in Vienna, threatening to turn Berlin over to East Germany. Kennedy’s response was to make public the vast strategic advantage of the United States, prompting Khrushchev to seek to remedy the imbalance through the surrepti- tious installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Sobered by the missile crisis, Kennedy

170

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2005.7.3.169 by guest on 26 September 2021 Book Reviews

turned to ªnding ways to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union, using his com- mencement address at American University on 10 June 1963 to speak eloquently about the need for peace and to announce that he and Khrushchev had agreed to ne- gotiate a nuclear test ban treaty. Dallek is not obliged to accept Beschloss’s formulation, but he writes as if it and other such analyses do not exist. Rather than accepting or rejecting Beschloss’s linkage of events, Dallek ignores it. He fails to mention Kennedy’s January 1961 “moment of danger” address at all, and he minimizes the importance of Kennedy’s American Uni- versity speech, saying “it received barely a mention in the press” (p. 261). In reality, the speech was reported as the lead story in the next day’s New York Times, where it was highlighted with a four-column headline and a second interpretive article. Dallek’s failure to look closely at Kennedy and the Cold War is also evident in his inattention to important works on the topic. Examples of writings not listed in his bibliography include such Cold War–era contributions as Desmond Ball’s richly doc- umented Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Admin- istration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and John Lewis Gaddis’s re- view of the declassiªed post–Cold War record, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). In short, An Unªnished Life is a contribution to the understanding of John F. Kennedy, but not to Kennedy and the Cold War.

✣✣✣

Ronald J. Granieri, The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, The CDU/CSU and the West, 1949–1966. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. 256 pp. $69.95.

Reviewed by Thomas A. Schwartz, Vanderbilt University

Pundits went to great lengths in the summer of 2002 to explain German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s break with the United States over Iraq. Some lamented the end of the postwar U.S.-German alliance and remembered a “golden age” of Atlantic solidar- ity when the Christian Democrats under the venerable Konrad Adenauer led the Fed- eral Republic. Many argued that the new Germany with its center in Berlin and now under the leftwing Social Democrats was simply more inclined to stand against Amer- ican leadership. Ronald Granieri’s Ambivalent Alliance should be required reading for those prone to such quick generalizations about German politics. Granieri has crafted an elegant and sophisticated history of Konrad Adenauer’s leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Volkspartei or people’s party that would dominate West German politics for its ªrst two decades. Granieri argues that the central issue in this early history was not whether West Germany would pursue integration with the West rather than seeking reuniªcation. Konrad Adenauer was basically correct when he argued, in response to Kurt Schumacher’s accusation that Adenauer was the “Chancellor of the Allies,” that if Schumacher were in his shoes he would follow a

171

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2005.7.3.169 by guest on 26 September 2021