Book Reviews

Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 344 pp.

Reviewed by Piotr S. Wandycz, Yale University

The Red Prince is more than a biography of the little known Wilhelm Habsburg (1895–1948). Timothy Snyder, a prominent Yale University historian, weaves the story of the archduke and his family into the rich canvas of European history. Were it not for a most impressive array of sources and a scholarly apparatus, the book could almost qualify as a vie romancée. This is legitimate because the house of Habsburg occupied for centuries several thrones in Europe as well as brieºy that of Mexico. Wil- helm’s father thought of extending his dynasty’s domain into Poland and the Balkans, and he trained his sons to be future rulers of these countries. Wilhelm identiªed himself with the Ukrainians. In ten chapters with catchy titles (Gold, Blue, Green, Red, Grey, White, Lilac, Brown, Black, Orange), Snyder describes the life and activities of this eccentric individual, somewhat unbalanced and politically naive, starting with a happy childhood in a villa on the Adriatic and ending with his death as a Western secret agent in a So- viet prison. In previous writings Snyder has shown a talent for large synthetic analysis, as in The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), and for biographical studies, notably in Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). In both of these books he raised broad and pertinent questions. Snyder is fascinated by, among other things, the phenomenon of split national allegiance in families of East-Central Europe. Indeed the brother of Wilhelm, a Ukrai- nian colonel, was a Polish colonel and patriot. The story of the Red Prince is told against the background of Wilhelm’s family, which contained a number of colorful and eccentric individuals. Snyder does not shun from recounting family gossip and scandals. Some details may appear superºu- ous and of marginal importance for the main story, but they add color to a study that is not only a good read but a genuine contribution to a little known aspect of East Eu- ropean , indeed European, history. Given the scope of this book and the variety of stories included, it is surprising that the number of minor errors and slips is so small. Most of them have no direct bearing on the biography of the archduke. Still, it might have been better if Snyder

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had not tried to include so much material, especially historical background and international politics. Some of his statements are oversimpliªed and inexact. The presenta- tion of the Cossacks in history and a characterization of post-Versailles Europe are cases in point. During World War I, Wilhelm underwent a transformation from an Austrian ofªcer increasingly interested in his Ukrainian soldiers to a potential Ukrainian military and political leader—Vasyl Vyshyvanyi. A Ukrainian crown, however, proved a mirage, and German policies in Ukraine prevailed over Habsburg plans. With the end of the war and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Wilhelm became involved in intrigues of reactionary “white international” circles based in Ger- many and pursued Ukrainian mirages. His pronounced anti-Polish stance led to a break with his father. Wilhelm’s postwar wandering took him to Spain, where he tried some business operations, and then to Paris, where he led the life of a homosexual playboy while still pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp of Ukrainian statehood and Habsburg restoration. Snyder devotes a long chapter ªlled with juicy details to this somewhat sordid phase of the archduke’s life. Eventually, Wilhelm became enmeshed in a ªnancial scandal and had to ºee France to avoid prison. Humiliated and disoriented, he found refuge in fas- cism, anti-Semitism, and bizarre dreams of a fascist Ukraine supported by Nazi Ger- many. With the outbreak of the war in 1939, Wilhelm donned a German uniform, but the Germans did not use him even as a political pawn. He managed, however, to receive compensation for the family estate in Poland conªscated by the Nazis. The estate’s rightful owner, Karol Olbracht, who insisted on his Polish nationality, was dis- possessed and imprisoned. Olbracht’s Swedish-born wife joined the Polish under- ground. Wilhelm, always somewhat erratic in his views, grew disenchanted with Nazi policies, especially vis-à-vis Ukraine, and engaged in anti-Nazi espionage. After the occupation of Austria by the Four Powers in 1945, Wilhelm supported democracy and settled in the British Zone of Vienna. Always restless and insouciant, he began to work with his Ukrainian friends for Western intelligence against the So- viet Union. Soviet foreign intelligence agents in Vienna had an easy task of kidnap- ping him and taking him to a prison in Kyiv. There he died of tuberculosis after nearly a year in captivity. True to form, the Soviet government denied his death. In the ªnal chapter, titled “Orange: European Revolution,” Snyder discusses the fall of Communism and the rise of a new Europe. Wilhelm, who had embodied the Habsburg connection to Ukraine, did not live to see it happen. But Otto Habsburg, the pretender to the throne, was active in the Council of Europe and stressed the importance of Ukraine. Snyder makes the point that for the ªrst time not only a Ukrai- nian state but an Austrian nation emerged. He insists that present-day Ukraine is “the test of the viability of that modern political form, the nation-state,” and wonders about its survival in Europe. Snyder draws some interesting parallels between the Habsburg monarchy and the European Union and between the former Ukraine and the United States. His conclusions, though not always convincing, are stimulating and

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thought-provoking. This is also true for the connection he makes between the turbu- lent, bizarre, and politically marginal activities of Wilhelm and the larger issues. A certain nostalgic tone to the ruminations in the ªnal chapter comes out clearly in the wistful, moving, and beautifully written epilogue. Reading it, I was reminded of the French saying tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse (everything passes, everything breaks, everything grows weary).

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Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk, SB a Lech Walësa: Przyczynek do biograªi [The SB and Lech Walësa: A Contribution toward a Biography]. Warsaw: Instytut Pamièci Narodowej, 2008. 750 pp.

Reviewed by Michael Szporer, University of Maryland University College

“If Lech Walësa—the head of NSZZ Solidarnonb, the legendary leader of the march to freedom in the 1980s and then president of Poland in 1990–1995—could not free himself of the burden of the past, what can one expect of the tens of thousand of others who maintained compromising contacts with SB, and now hold high governmental posts?” ask Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk in their widely debated book. The authors concede that TW (short for tajny wpólpracownik; i.e., secret infor- mant) Bolek, who is widely assumed to have been Walësa, broke contacts with the Se- curity Service (SB) in 1976. They acknowledge that alleged contacts after Walësa gained visibility as the leader of Solidarity were dubious, at least some clearly doctored in an attempt to discredit him in the eyes of his friends, the Roman Catholic Church, and the international community, even sabotaging his chances for the Nobel Prize in 1982–1983. In the 1980s, Walësa’s ªle consisted of 43 volumes, including tapes and ªlm, and many of the critical documents supplement the book. One would expect that the SB attempted to pressure Walësa by resurrecting the Bolek ªle, ªrst when he joined the Coastal WZZ (Free Trade Union) in 1978 and subsequently at critical moments of his activities as the leader of Solidarity—before and after the signing of the Gdañsk Accords, during the heyday of Solidarity, and before and after the martial law. One would expect an elaborate disinformation campaign directed at Walësa, his family, and friends, as well as around-the-clock surveil- lance to neutralize his activities without physically harming him, for fear that a physical attack would have implicated the regime of Wojciech Jaruzelski. One can even speculate, as Walësa’s conªdant during the 1980 Gdañsk shipyard strike, Zenon Kwoka, did in an interview, that the Communist regime would have been more reluctant to come to agreement with Solidarity if it had thought it could not control Walësa. Nonetheless, even though the Gdañsk opposition was meticulously moni- tored, there is no evidence that the Communist regime ever controlled Walësa, steered the 1980 strikes, or guided other historically critical events in which he participated. Cenckiewicz and Gontarczyk do not entertain the question of whether SB pressure affected Walësa’s decisions or signiªcantly changed the course of modern history.

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They make a strong case for a cover-up, especially after the so-called ªrst lustration associated with the “Macierewicz List” that made Walësa’s early collaboration public (although other leading Gdañsk workers were already aware in August 1980 of Walësa’s earlier contacts and even debated whether to keep him as leader shortly after the signing of the accords). The authors are probably right in arguing that Walësa as president sought to retaliate. He replaced pro-Solidarity Major Adam Hodysz as head of the Gdañsk branch of the Ofªce of State Security with former SB ofªcers after Hodysz made the Bolek ªle available to Antoni Macierewicz. Walësa surrounded himself with seasoned spies like Wiktor Fonfara and Gromyslaw Czempiñski, who were among the last to handle the Bolek ªle, apparently including materials recovered from the destruction of ªles, such as the 54 microªlms found in the possession of an alleged dealer in nuclear materials, former SB Major Jerzy Fráczkowski. The microªlms also included documents about other leading opposition ªgures during the Communist era, such as Bogdan Borusewicz, Jacek Merkel, Lech Kaczyñski, and Bogdan Lis. The authors convincingly document two incidents of careful purging of the Bolek ªle, possibly by Walësa, and they claim that the release of the ªle, ordered by President Walësa’s security minister, Andrzej Milczanowski, circumvented procedures and vio- lated the law. Walësa also blocked lustration efforts after the existence of the Bolek ªle became public, which led to the fall of Prime Minister Jan Olszewski’s government in June 1992. The authors observe that subsequent lustration attempts to revise history were deeply ºawed, based on the testimony of unreliable witnesses and on misrepresenta- tion of procedures and gathered evidence, as for example in the case of former post- Communist Prime Minister Józef Oleksy and judge Boz&ena Bwikowska, among others. Putting aside the debate over different versions of history, it is likely that Walësa’s decisions were driven by personal motivations, essentially defending his good name. Such reactions raise questions about his character or his abilities to reason and act presidentially. However, his private likes or dislikes, retributions, or even transgressions while in ofªce in the 1990s do not diminish his historical role as the leader of the Solidarity union in the 1980s, when he made critical decisions and sacriªces on its behalf. Walësa’s refusal, despite coming under great pressure, to head party-controlled unions shortly after the martial-law clampdown on 12–13 December 1981, which would have been a serious setback to the anti-opposition, demonstrates that he was not mired in personal ambitions. Conversations with SB cited in the book suggest that the leader of Solidarity played to the expectations of his opponents, who at the highest levels seriously underestimated him. The destruction of documents in the Bolek ªle did take place on Walësa’s watch as president. Personal vanity did not change the course of Poland’s history in 1980 at its most visible global moment at the time of the Gdañsk strike or subsequently, but Poland would have been a different country after 1990 if Walësa had fully admitted his moments of weakness when he became president and had asked others to follow his example. He could have apologized to the shipyard workers on whom he allegedly reported. The brief autobiographical admission in Walësa’s A Way of Hope, subsequent defensiveness, and threats of legal action against former Solidarity leaders Anna

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Walentynowicz and Krzysztof Wyszkowski did not endear him to those who knew and respected him—or to the millions who put their trust in him. “It is easier to have said than done,” Walësa tried to explain to me once, and there is no question of his place in history. Walësa the myth was too proud to admit the shortcomings of Walësa the man, and this decision to gloss over his past did injure people and in the end shook his credibility. At the same time, the authors of SBaWalësa, as children of Soli- darity, can be seen as trying to restore historical memory by bringing down the legend of the working class hero to the human level, suggesting that we should not make of ourselves more than what we are. But it behooves the children of Solidarity to restore the moral claim of Solidarity objectively and with balance rather than blaming Walësa for all the failures resulting from not making a clean break with the past in post-Communist Poland. By all indi- cations, SB a Lech Walësa is not primarily a book about Lech Walësa—it is a case ªle for a more serious historical argument, one that a book published under the aegis of IPN should have presented more fairly. In meticulous detail the authors illustrate how thousands of self-serving, unrepentant individuals who compromised themselves under Communism have remained in public life—not admitting their complicity, deºecting objections, or openly distorting their past. Walësa’s case pales in comparison to many. In such a context, Polish politicians, especially those who emerged from Soli- darity’s ranks, which would include the leaders of the Law and Justice Party and the ruling Civic Platform, have a moral obligation to be honest about history. They must acknowledge that Solidarity was an inclusive grassroots movement dethroning person- ality cults and illegitimate centers of power; it was a popular rising against the stric- tures of the Communist regime; and it was self-limiting in a more literal sense than proposed by Jadwiga Staniszkis. A lesson to be drawn from Walësa’s biography is that he won our hearts when he acted as the tribune of the people, not when he tried to be something more or less than that. The hero would have remained a full hero and would have done greater service to his country if he had openly admitted his past. That said, the book by Cenckiewicz and Gontarczyk should have been more nuanced in judging anti-Communist leaders. As it stands, the book unfairly singles out Walësa. Among the volume’s most memorable villains are the jurists and the hypocritical politicians still in ofªce who did not ex- cuse themselves from judging the Walësa case for conºict of interest; or those with political ambitions who stayed in ofªce in spite of their tarnished past, some with far more serious moral transgressions on their conscience than the former leader of Soli- darity. President Lech Kaczyñski’s failed attempt in 2008 to diminish Walësa’s stature as a national leader on the ninetieth anniversary of Poland’s independence seems mostly to have been part of a personal vendetta that has little to do with history or with restoring moral values. Kaczyñski’s action was widely seen abroad as a breach of civility, for the right historical reasons.

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Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., Katyn: A Crime without Punishment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 561 pp.

Reviewed by Stanley Cloud, former foreign correspondent and Washington bureau chief for Time

Katyn is the name of a village and nearby forest in the Smolensk region of Russia, about 230 miles west of Moscow. In 1943, German troops who were based in the area after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union uncovered an enormous mass grave in the Katyn Forest. When they excavated, they found the rotting corpses of some 4,000 uniformed Polish army ofªcers, their hands bound, most of them shot in the head. Ever since that gruesome discovery, the word “Katyn” has served, especially in Poland, as historical shorthand for the systematic execution by Soviet authorities of some 22,000 Poles—mostly army ofªcers but also policemen and civilians—in the spring of 1940. Only about a third of the executions occurred at Katyn. The thousands of other victims were shot in camps located in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and the Russian city of Tver (formerly Kalinin), about a hundred miles northwest of Moscow. Among the manifold horrors of World War II—from the Holocaust and the Bataan Death March to the Blitz, Dresden, and Hiroshima-Nagasaki—relatively little attention has been paid over the years to Katyn (pronounced “KA-tin” by Poles and “ka-TIN” by Russians and Ukrainians). The reasons for the murders themselves and for their comparative neglect by history are many and complex. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, so much new material has become available from former East-bloc archives that scholars have for the ªrst time been able to provide detailed, if still incomplete, descriptions of what happened and why. This, in turn, has created new interest among journalists, writers, and moviemakers. (In 2007, for example, a movie titled Katyñ, by the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda, was released and later nominated for an Academy Award as the year’s best foreign ªlm.) Most of the scholarly and general-interest activity has until recently taken place in Poland and Russia. Now Yale University Press has published Katyn: A Crime without Punishment as part of its Annals of Communism series. An extensive collection of documents, photographs, and maps, interspersed with narratives, background, and commentary by its editors, the book synthesizes and translates much of the work that has been done abroad; it therefore seems more likely to serve as a source for English- speaking researchers and interested lay persons than as anything approaching a deªnitive account in its own right, all the more so because the editors’ writing style is, almost to a fault, scholarly and dispassionate. Still, the editors are to be congratulated for compiling and publishing a fairly exhaustive and beneªcial one-volume summary of what is known today about a terrible tragedy and a monstrous crime. The geopolitics of World War II and its aftermath help explain both why Katyn occurred and why, even today, it is not widely remembered or understood. As this book makes clear, the crime’s origins lie in the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov non- aggression treaty between Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Josif Stalin’s Soviet Union. A then-secret section of the infamous treaty provided for the German invasion of Poland

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on 1 September 1939 and for a Soviet invasion a short time later. This deal was intended to reestablish a “partition” of Poland similar to that which existed from the late eighteenth century to the end of World War I. The scheme, fulªlling what leaders in Germany and Russia had long seen as their historical destiny, was for Nazi Germany to control western and southern Poland and for the Soviet Union to control the eastern portion. When the Red Army fulªlled its part of the bargain and invaded eastern Poland on 17 September 1939, it brought with it Stalin’s ªrm intention to create a Commu- nist government there, enforced by his army and by Lavrentii Beria’s state security forces. The Poles already had far more than they could handle in their ªght with the Germans and were utterly unequipped, in either manpower or weaponry, to wage a two-front war. Indeed, despite sporadic Polish attempts at resistance in the east, many Poles, military and civilian alike, naïvely hoped that they might somehow join forces with the Soviet Union against the Germans. It was in this hope that large numbers of Polish ofªcers and enlisted men voluntarily surrendered to the Red Army. Stalin, however, was bent on conquest and domination, not cooperation. He saw Poles in general—and the intellectual, military, and political elites in particular—as “enemies of the people” and “counterrevolutionaries.” Under his and Beria’s orders, hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians were deported to Siberia, and tens of thousands of Polish military ofªcers—many of them reservists who in civilian life had been among the country’s professional and social leaders—were similarly deported or were herded into ostensible prisoner-of-war camps that in short order became death camps. A few months after the Soviet invasion, according to documents translated in Katyn, Stalin ordered nearly all of the Polish ofªcers in three camps to be shot. In June 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin. The Wehrmacht pushed the Red Army out of Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe and invaded the Soviet Union on a broad front extending from Leningrad to the Black Sea. Almost overnight, the Soviet Union became an ally of Great Britain and later the United States in the war against Ger- many—indeed, a crucial ally, keeping the Germans occupied on the eastern front while the other Allies planned and prepared for D-Day in 1944. Thus, when Wehrmacht troops discovered the mass grave in the Katyn Forest in 1943 and Nazi propagandists accused the Soviet Union of the crime, the Allies—except for Poland’s London-based government-in-exile—blamed Germany and ignored evidence that pointed toward Moscow. Propaganda had largely trumped the truth. After the war, both the West and the Soviet bloc preferred to let the matter slip between the historical cracks. Other- wise, Soviet authorities would have had to explain away the forensic evidence of their own crime, and the Western allies would have had to confess their embarrassing willingness to overlook both that evidence and the crime itself. Not until Mikhail Gorbachev admitted Soviet guilt in 1990 did the truth ªnally begin to emerge. But by then those who had ordered the executions of the Polish ofªcers were long dead (apart from Lazar Kaganovich, who died in mid-1991 at age 98), along with most, though not all, of those who carried out the orders. Katyn is subtitled “A Crime without Punishment.” Many Poles consider it shock-

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ing that Soviet judges served on the tribunal at Nuremburg rather than being among the defendants. But war crimes are rarely found to have been committed by the vic- tors. In this case, the best anyone can expect, probably, is that dogged researchers will continue their archival work and that books like this will continue to be published.

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Roger Engelmann and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, eds., Volkserhebung gegen den SED- Staat: Eine Bestandsaufnahme zum 17. Juni 1953. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rup- recht, 2005. 478 pp. 32.90£.

Reviewed by Gary Bruce, University of Waterloo

This work is the proceedings (some of the contributions verbatim) of a conference held in 2003 by the Federal Commissioner for the State Security (Stasi) Files, the BStU, on the 50th anniversary of the uprising in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on 17 June 1953. Rather than an in-depth examination of the uprising, the editors, Roger Engelmann and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, both researchers in the Educa- tion and Research Branch of the BStU and proliªc authors, provide an overview of current research on the uprising. This book follows closely on the heels of the majestic book coauthored by Kowalczuk with Bernd Eisenfeld and Erhart Neubert, Die verdrängte Revolution: Der Platz des 17. Juni 1953 in der deutschen Geschichte (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2004), which strongly argues for the categorization of June 1953 as a revolutionary movement that should stand beside the other great revolutions in Eu- ropean history. The book is divided into ªve sections: (1) the uprising, (2) the international context, (3) the instruments of repression during the crisis, (4) social and regional aspects, and (5) the uprising in collective memory. The ªrst section provides a useful overview of current debates about the uprising (Was it a revolution or uprising? Was it a workers’ protest or popular protest?) as well as drawing attention to often overlooked aspects of 1953. Karl Wilhelm Fricke’s plea that the background to the uprising take into account the brutal Soviet occupation and the falsiªed election of 1946 is long overdue. Similarly, Torsten Diedrich reminds readers that the apparently excessive number of Soviet troops employed on 17 June was a result of Soviet fears that Western Allied troops would become involved. The second section discusses the effect of the uprising in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Although there is little new here on the Soviet response, the chapters on Poland and Czechoslovakia demonstrate the grave concern in those countries of a spillover from their neighbor. Just as Armin Mitter, Stefan Wolle, and Kowalczuk argued in an earlier book, Der Tag “X”: Die “Innere Staatsgründung” der DDR als Ergebnis der Krise, 1952/54 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1995), that historians should see the 17 June uprising in a broader temporal context spanning 1952–1954, so, too, do these contributions remind scholars that the uprising had spatial ramiªcations throughout the Soviet bloc. Kowalczuk’s brilliant chapter in the third section on the GDR’s system of justice

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prior to and after the uprising deals indirectly with a key debate about GDR history. He argues that the legal system was exploited to repress the population and that, in turn, the population had little conªdence in the system. Although scholars have challenged the contention by Mitter and Wolle in Untergang auf Raten (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1993) that the GDR was characterized by a latent civil war throughout its existence, Kowalczuk’s contribution in this volume suggests that the events of 17 June fundamentally eroded popular conªdence in the law and thus instilled a permanent mistrust toward the authorities. One of the centerpieces of this volume is Tobias Wunschik’s chapter on the storming of prisons in June 1953, a sorely neglected topic considering that demonstrations took place at more than 70 prisons or holding sites in and around 17 June. For Wunschik, this “storming of the Bastille” adds a key “revolutionary” element to the uprising. Roger Engelmann’s chapter on the expansion of the repressive apparatus after 1953 argues that the uprising was but one of the events—albeit a very important one—in the history of the GDR that led to the regime’s obses- sion with internal security. The fourth section highlights some of the reasons for regional variations in the uprising. Christoph Kleßmann suggests that the uprising was more intense in regions that had a long-standing tradition of working-class activism. Arnd Bauerkämper and Burghard Ciesla point out that the countryside also saw its fair share of revolutionary activity in 1953, highlighted by a mass exodus from the agricultural collectives. Heidi Roth and Hans-Peter Löhn’s microstudies of Saxony and the Halle Region demonstrate how local conditions and persons of inºuence often dictated the course of the revolution. The ªnal section deals with the long-term consequences of June 1953. Bernd Eisenfeld argues that the 17 June uprising was a “double trauma,” one that caused the regime to fear a recurrence of mass unrest, and one that caused the population to resign itself to the fact that mass popular protest would be ineffectual as long as the So- viet Union was willing to intervene. The two chapters on the role of “17 June” as the West German Day of German Unity discuss just how problematic, indeed embarrassing, this day became as the division of Germany became increasingly permanent and as Western academics argued that June 1953 was nothing more than a strike. Walter Süß’s comparison of 1953 and 1989 reminds readers that the changed international situation was key to the success of 1989 in contrast to 1953. Increasing attention has been given of late to the 1953 East German uprising. This is as it should be. Roughly 1 million people took part in demonstrations and strikes in over 700 locales in 1953, making it the largest revolution in German history prior to 1989 and one of the largest in European history. This volume suggests that the most fruitful areas for further research are in microstudies of the uprising, in plac- ing the events of June 1953 in a bloc-wide context, and in the long-term consequences of the uprising in both East and West Germany. This important book fulªlls in exem- plary fashion its purpose of providing a snapshot of current research and offering an intellectual framework with which to understand this major historical event.

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Armin Grünbacher, Reconstruction and Cold War in Germany: The Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (1948–1961). Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. 278 pp. $99.95.

David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denaziªcation, and the Americans, 1945–1953. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 325 pp. $45.00.

Reviewed by Henry Burke Wend, University School of Milwaukee

After 1945, the U.S. Cold War agenda altered the implementation of policies initially designed to reorient Germany’s economy and culture. Economically, the United States encouraged the reemergence of individuals and institutions that had dominated the German economy prior to World War II, albeit this time within a liberal international economic system. In cultural policy, U.S. ofªcials curbed their attempts to remold German culture as the Cold War intensiªed. The two books under review examine West Germany’s economic and cultural response to the Cold War and the new American hegemony. Armin Grünbacher argues that U.S. pressure on the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to synchronize its economic policies with the exigencies of U.S. Cold War policies strengthened institutions and industries that had been dominant before 1945, thereby militating against full economic liberalization. David Monod contends that America’s attempt to reorient German culture failed but did push some artists and musicians in new directions. Al- though the two books diverge in content and approach, the authors demonstrate that extreme traditionalism ºavored the German reception of the American message. Grünbacher’s study focuses on the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), a Hauptleihinstitut (main lending institute) established under the auspices of the Mar- shall Plan. Chartered in 1948, the KfW served as the repository for local currency counterpart funds deposited to match the dollar value of aid-in-kind delivered under the Marshall Plan. The KfW loaned these Counterpart Funds and subsequently cy- cled repayment and interest into the economy. During the early Cold War, the KfW not only served as an agent for economic reconstruction but often ªlled the ªnancial breach in U.S.-inspired Cold War initiatives. KfW policies followed the path set by American Cold War policies ªrst as a major player in pushing West Germany’s recovery and industrial contribution to Western defense and later as a ªnancier of the FRG’s complicated reemergence in global trade. From Grünbacher’s perspective, the KfW was not an American innovation. Rather, it was ªrmly rooted in Germany’s “statist and corporatist traditions” (p. 1). The personnel that manned the KfW, led by board chairman Hermann Abs, had dominated German banking circles before 1945. Moreover, the KfW’s policies undermined the liberalization of economic institutions and market relations in West Ger- many. The U.S. drive for FRG rearmament after 1950 inºuenced the activities of the KfW. Rearmament necessitated the revival of heavy and extractive industries. This, in turn, militated against the path for recovery that Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard had envisioned, one in which light industries and consumer industries would take a leading role. Grünbacher presents the 1951 Investitionshilfegesetz (Auxiliary Invest-

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ment Law, or AIL) as a case in point. Under American pressure to expand heavy industry for the sake of rearmament, the FRG government turned to industrialists to contribute money voluntarily for the expansion of the West German coal and steel industries. The AIL therefore levied taxes on FRG consumer industries for the sake of rearmament. The AIL, Grünbacher argues, reestablished the signiªcance of heavy industry and its industrial organizations within the economy. This interpretation di- verges from Wolfgang Zank’s explanation in “Dirigismus nach Erhards Art,” Die Zeit (Hamburg), 1 May 1992, p. 30. Zank argues that the AIL was really Erhard’s shrewd maneuver to avoid direct state intervention in the economy. Grünbacher persuasively demonstrates that the AIL ran counter to Erhard’s wishes. Grünbacher’s other chapters chronicle how the KfW funded housing projects, aided industries in Berlin, and reoriented West German trade away from Eastern Eu- rope and into the American-led Western world. In foreign aid, the KfW ªnanced projects of dubious economic merit in Yugoslavia at the behest of the United States. The KfW also played a critical role in buying the Third World’s compliance with the Hallstein Doctrine in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Grünbacher cites India as an example of a country in which West German ofªcials deliberately used KfW invest- ments to halt recognition of the East German regime. Grünbacher’s book makes several key contributions to our understanding of the impact of U.S. Cold War policies on the FRG’s economic recovery. First, it provides an English-language economic history of postwar West Germany using a previously untapped source, the records of the KfW. Second, and unusual for English-language treatments of postwar Germany, it relies on Werner Abelshauser’s interpretation in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik, 1945–1980 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), instead of Volker Berghahn’s The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945– 1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), which he does not cite. Grünbacher corroborates Abelshauser’s contention that preexisting institutions and ideas bounded the West German response to the Marshall Plan and U.S. Cold War policies. The result was a highly politicized “post-liberal” economy with a circumscribed market that dampened consumption for the sake of industrial investment and labor peace. This stands in stark contrast to Berghahn’s interpretation of an “Americanized” economy that subtly shifted inºuence and emphasis to consumer industries. Third, Grün- bacher’s book reinforces the interpretation that the Marshall Plan was wildly successful in implanting the image of unlimited American generosity in the minds of West Germans, although American aid never accounted for more than 5 percent of reconstruction investment. Monod’s study of classical music and the U.S. occupation examines the FRG’s attempts to reassert cultural sovereignty, but one no less rooted in tradition. Monod focuses on the work of the American Military Government’s Theater and Music Branch of the Information Control Division (ICD) that operated in western Germany after 1945. The ICD concentrated on classical music because of its signiªcance as a cultural expression of Germany and National Socialism. The ICD viewed classical music and its purveyors as the bastion of arrogance and a sense of cultural superiority, which had been purged of foreign and modern elements during the Third Reich. Accordingly,

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the ICD targeted men such as conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, pianist Walter Gieseking, and composer Richard Strauss in an attempt to cleanse National Socialism from the cultural fabric of postwar Germany. Arranged into six chapters, Monod’s book shows the rise and gradual disintegration of the American Military Government’s push for the denaziªcation of classical music. Beginning with a chapter tracing the evolution of the ICD from the wartime Ofªce of War Information and Psychological War Division, Monod shows how classical music assumed a special place in the minds of the Americans sent over to monitor Germany’s cultural reorientation—a place separate from “show tunes,” which were considered business-oriented as opposed to being part of culture. Monod presents a collective portrait of ICD members such as Major John Bitter, General Robert McClure, Newall Jenkins, and John Evarts. These were decent men who had command of the German language and were involved in music in the United States. Lack- ing were guidelines on how to deal with German musicians and any consensus on the best means to achieve the goal of an opening of German music. Some U.S. ofªcials fa- vored a blanket denaziªcation, whereas others wanted to proceed on a case-by-case basis. The one point on which unanimity existed was that Germans needed to be ex- posed to different types of music, to be played and conducted by non-Germans or at least by those who had fallen from favor during the Third Reich. Because most ªnancial support for music in the FRG came from public sources, one initiative to dis- tance classical music from reactionary state control was to privatize the industry. An- other tactic with far-reaching implications was the distancing of the public ofªce of Intendanten (business managers who hired conductors and inºuenced the selection of classical music at the municipal level) from those who had held favor during the Third Reich. U.S. ofªcials assumed that these men would encourage the performance of new music. In the end, however, ªscal realities, democracy, and Cold War policies undermined U.S. efforts to control the personnel and content of classical music. First, the U.S. postwar demobilization led to deep cuts in the number of American personnel in Germany in 1946. This reduced the ICD to a skeleton crew insufªcient in numbers to police the entire industry. Second, German musicians, such as Furtwängler, were convinced that professional success during the Third Reich was distinct from invidi- ous participation in the Nazi party, even though many of these musicians had beneªted from the removal of their Jewish colleagues. Lucius Clay’s decision to turn denaziªcation over to the Germans in 1946 meant that the German deªnition of complicity, not an American one, would determine a musician’s fate. This shift effectively ended American veto power over personnel decisions of German musical en- sembles and allowed many musicians to return whom the United States had previously deemed obnoxious. Lastly, the currency reform of 1948 undid many of the U.S. efforts to compel the Germans to slate experimental and risky music or to privatize. The loss of liquidity, combined with the ICD’s loss of control over personnel, led to a reactionary tendency within public orchestras and operas. Intendanten argued that the public was not willing to spend scarce Deutschmarks on experimental pieces. Rather, they would come out only for performances of old reliable pieces popular, no doubt,

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during the Third Reich. Finally, Monod examines the period after the 1949 Occupa- tion Statute and the U.S. State Department’s assumption of cultural relations. By this point, the United States was seeking mainly to introduce West German audiences to American performers and music, a policy that did not have the intended effect. Even in the most successful instances, such as Leonard Bernstein’s guest appearance with the Munich Opera, West Germans regarded the Americans as distinct and inferior to Ger- man musicians and compositions. The strength of Monod’s book lies in its clarity of style and organization. Free of jargon, it is an accessible, very well-written book that was a pleasure to read. Further- more, Monod has thoroughly mined the archives in Britain, France, the United States, and Germany to tell a compelling story about interesting people. His apparent sympathy for the blanket condemnation of musicians is a bit troubling, however. After all, postwar American history has been hallmarked by the struggle against the prosecution of people by category rather than by individual cases. Further, had the United States really cracked down, the other occupying powers would have wooed the musicians away from the American zone, mitigating the impact of such policies. What, then, was the impact of U.S. policies on West Germany’s economic and cultural reconstruction? Grünbacher demonstrates that Marshall Plan money combined with FRG ªnancial resources to rebuild West Germany’s economy into the most dynamic in Western Europe. This effort required the United States to make use of German actors and their institutions for both the physical reconstruction of West Germany and the reorientation of its trade patterns away from its traditional East- West conªguration. Grünbacher, building on Abelshauser’s work, convincingly shows the continuities of German ªnancial and industrial structures. But West Germany was integrated westward into a liberal international system instead of reverting to its traditional approach of an autarkic Grossraumwirtschaft rooted in Central Europe and East- West trade. This outcome, marking a true break with the past, was driven by U.S. policies. Culturally, as Monod shows, U.S. policies caused West German ofªcials, especially the Intendanten, to become much more mindful of scheduling new and experimental pieces and hiring some foreign musicians and conductors. However, the United States failed to push for the removal of individuals who were associated with the Third Reich. By 1948, American policies aimed to keep Germans in the Western zones alive and non-Communist. Although the U.S. inºuence was signiªcant, these two books show that U.S. Cold War policies allowed West Germans to regain a degree of autonomy that, in turn, enabled the reemergence of German traditionalism in the corporatist economy and in classical music. In both cases, U.S. expedience permitted actors in the FRG the latitude to adapt to new conditions while retaining traditional trappings and at the same time avoiding awkward memories. The price paid was a de- lay in economic liberalization and in forcing these same people to confront their past honestly.

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Damian van Melis and Henrik Bispinck, eds., “Republikºucht”: Flucht und Abwan- derung aus der SBZ/DDR 1945 bis 1961 [“Flight from the Republic”: Flight and Emi- gration from the Soviet Zone/German Democratic Republic, 1945–1961]. Munich: Oldenbourg 2006, 276 pp.

Reviewed by Gerhard Wettig, Federal Institute of East European and International Studies (Germany)

During the Russian Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin observed that the soldiers were “voting by their feet” against capitalism by leaving the army. In eastern Germany which was subjected to Sovietization after World War II, the same thing occurred but in the opposite direction: People were leaving for the capitalistic part of their country. In the early postwar years, the occupation authorities and their German Communist (SED) henchmen felt that emigration was more useful than obnoxious because it helped them to cope with the task of supplying the population and to impose socialist transformation on an unwilling society. They realized only in 1952 that they were confronted with a phenomenon that would not cease after an initial period of change but was developing into a permanent threat to their regime. The Soviet Union’s decision in mid-1951 to abandon hope for early socialist uniªcation of Germany and to include the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the Soviet military bloc resulted in an emphasis on systemic rather than national appeal. Massive migration to the West, however, testiªed to the lack of socialist attractiveness. At the same time, leaders in both Moscow and East Berlin understood that migration created serious socioeconomic problems: Precisely those whom the SED regime wanted to stay—highly skilled personnel and young people—were the ones who were most eager to leave. To be sure, the GDR constitution of 1949 had stipulated ev- eryone’s right to choose his place of residence, but from 1952 onward the authorities increasingly sought to prevent emigration. Although Iosif Stalin had ordered the clos- ing of the border to West Germany, he and his successors refused to do likewise with regard to West Berlin. Until November 1958, they wanted to uphold this city’s quad- ripartite status. When Nikita Khrushchev challenged the West on Berlin, he did not dare to escalate the conºict to the point that war would become a serious risk. For almost three years, he also hesitated to break Berlin apart because doing so would be tantamount to admitting openly that his concept of free competition between socialism and capitalism in Germany had failed. As a result, the SED leaders had to limit themselves to attempts to stop, or at minimum to limit, emigration by domestic action. Repressive measures were in- creased steadily, and “ºight from the republic” was even declared illegal and punish- able, but these measures had little effect as long as the road to the West was open in Berlin. When the East German regime adopted positive inducements for certain cate- gories of people to stay, this did not help much either. A major reason for this failure was that implementation of ideological “class struggle” imperatives was incompatible with the needs of those deemed to belong to “enemy classes.” When the Communist regime wanted to keep “experts” (e.g., physicians, who were sorely needed) in the

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country by granting them ªnancial and social privileges, party leaders saw this as only a temporary measure that must not be allowed to favor “capitalist elements” in the long run. Hence, these people’s children, as the next generation, had to be excluded from higher education. This, however, was a crucial motive for their parents’ choice to leave for the West in spite of their privileges. Discrimination on a “class” basis and the consequences of “class” politics were one of the dominant factors behind mass ºight in the ªrst place. Both political repression and economic failure were basically rooted in the regime’s anti-“bourgeois” orientation, that is, in the Communist imperative to break the socioeconomic power of the social strata that were believed to be enemies of the “working class” on grounds of their objective character. A telling example is agrarian policy. When masses of peasants left the GDR in 1959–1960 to escape from collectivization and thus caused a coun- trywide crisis of food supply, the authorities did not even consider easing the measure, let alone revoking it, for they believed that the elimination of private ownership of land was essential both to promote socialist transformation and to strengthen the socialist system. Propagandistic assertions that the peasants themselves would beneªt from the change proved to be unpersuasive. The fact that the SED regime, as a result of its unshakable commitment to ideological principles, was unable to respond adequately to the challenge of emigration created an increasingly dire threat to the GDR’s very existence. Khrushchev therefore came to sense that he had no choice but to allow for the construction of the Berlin Wall, which he had never wanted. Despite great difªculties with the storage of sources (the relevant materials are scattered over many ªles in various archives), the book, which consists of an introduc- tory analysis by Damian van Melis and documents compiled by both editors, is excellent in clarifying all domestic aspects of the GDR’s emigration problem. The dimen- sions were enormous: In the ten-and-a-half years from 1951 to August 1961 (when the Berlin Wall was built), more than 2.7 million people left for West Germany, most of them young, skilled, and highly educated, while only 573,000 chose to move in the reverse direction. The book sheds much light on the development of mass ºight over time, on its ups and downs depending on East German policies, and on the political, professional, social, and other—occasionally also ignoble—motives of those who left. The editors pay all their attention to the domestic aspects of emigration from the GDR. The international context, notably Soviet willingness or refusal to authorize measures of seclusion from the West, is outside the topical scope of the book.

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Stefano Bottoni, Transilvania rossa: Il comunismo romeno e la questione nazionale (1944–1965). Rome: Carocci, 2007. 238 pp.

Reviewed by Francesca Gori, UniCredit Group, Milan

Transylvania for centuries has been a crossroads of European cultures. Stefano Bottoni’s book thoroughly covers the history of this multiethnic region of East-

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Central Europe in the period from 1944 to 1965, fundamentally from the establishment of a “people’s democracy” in Romania to the rise of Nicolae Ceauqescu as leader of the Romanian Communist Party. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, Bottoni analyzes how the Ro- manian Communist regime managed the cohabitation of the four largest national groups in Transylvania—Romanians, Hungarians, Jews, and Germans—during the rule of Gheorgiu Gheorghiu-Dej, including the brief period (1952–1960) of Hungar- ian territorial independence in the eastern parts of Transylvania. Bottoni has carefully reconstructed the history of this region, using not only a wide range of secondary sources but also many newly available documents from Ro- manian, Hungarian, Russian, and British archives. Bottoni aims to demonstrate how the Communist regime succeeded in creating an ethnocratic state without resorting to massacres or deportation. He analyzes the building of the socialist state and the afªrmation in the mid-1950s of so-called national Communism, which adopted various strategies aimed at the “Romanianization” of Transylvania and the assimilation of the Magyars and the gradual extinction of the Jewish and German groups by means of a policy of forced emigration. With the consolidation of the Communist regime in the latter half of the 1940s, Romania seized Hungarian property, thanks to a policy of nationalization. The regime discriminated against Germans and Jews but adopted a generous cultural policy toward the Hungarians. In 1950 the Romanian government announced the birth in Transylvania of the independent Hungarian Region—the RAU—whose inhabit- ants were to enjoy extensive rights concerning their language and culture. In fact, the region was not truly independent because administrative and political decisions depended on the Communist party. Nor was it a purely Hungarian region of Transylvania—in only a few of its provinces were Hungarians a majority of the population. Bottoni explains why a regime claiming to appeal to internationalism and social equality in fact created a territorial entity based on the reinforcement of an ethnic identity instead of its abolition. In creating the RAU, the regime introduced new conºicts and feelings of resentment between the Hungarians and Romanians who lived in the region and those who lived outside. Bottoni leads us through the complex story of the formation of this ethnic enclave, from the strategy of “divide and rule” employed by Josif Stalin, the true creator of the RAU, in order to keep control of both Romania and Hungary, which both held claims on Transylvania after World War II. That same strategy was used by the Romanian Communist party toward the two ethnic groups of the region. Bottoni describes the impact of the regime’s policies on the lives of certain individuals and explains that the main reason for the creation of the RAU was the Soviet Communist regime’s application in Romania of korenizatsiya (“the planting of national roots”). This policy in the USSR’s own republics entailed the recruitment of political and cultural non-Russian elites who would be capable of managing local politics within the framework of a Soviet social and civil identity. The regime was convinced that nationalism would fade as socialism took root in societies that were reluctant to embrace a revolution. This strategy in Romania was successful at the beginning, as is shown by

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Bottoni’s chapter on collectivization, and was accepted passively in the RAU in the name of nationalism by intellectuals who had little sympathy with Communism. Bottoni also emphasizes that this concession to autonomy went hand in hand with the construction of a highly repressive, xenophobic system. To consolidate power, Dej resorted to a purge of Hungarian ofªcials and func- tionaries, and in Bottoni’s words “the terror was a sinister match to the campaign for the Constitution of the Hungarian Autonomous region.” Bottoni gives great importance to 1956, the year that highlighted the rift between the Hungarians and Romanians. The wave of repression in Hungary from 1957 to 1961 and the “national” turnaround of the Romanian regime marked a clean break with the previous multinational ideological debate. All this happened while the RAU in Transylvania was eliminated in 1960 and bilingual place-names were abolished. Finally, on the eve of Ceauqescu’s rise to power, the “Romanianization” of Transylvania was nearly com- plete. Bottoni’s book is an important addition to the historiography of Transylvania. He analyzes in depth the birth, development, and failure of the RAU and shows why this experiment was destined to fail, apart from the contingent reason of the RAU in- habitants’ support for the Hungarian revolution in 1956. By ethnicizing social relations, the expression “national in form, socialist in content” turned out to be exactly the opposite, as has been shown by the post-1989 events in Transylvania itself and, more dramatically, in the former Yugoslavia.

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Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944–1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. $75.00.

Reviewed by László Borhi, Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Peter Kenez writes that “nationalist and conservative politicians...partial to a certain exclusivist, almost racialist nationalism...date the beginning of Soviet oppression at theendofthewar....Liberal and socialist historians by contrast look favorably at the achievements of social revolution that took place at the end of the Second World War” (p. 289). But no “racial exclusivism” is needed to describe the 1945–1948 transitional period as pre-Stalinization. The debate should be decided by the weight of the evidence presented. Kenez argues that Soviet policy was improvised and evolved gradually from the end of the Second World War through the imposition of Communist control and that legitimate hopes for democracy survived until the middle of 1947. In 1944, according to Kenez, Josif Stalin did not foresee two opposing blocs. Soviet foreign policy changed because harsh domestic controls were reimposed in 1946. This led to the cut- ting of ties with the outside world, especially the West. By mid-1947 Soviet leaders were no longer concerned about the Western response to their actions. But one could

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argue that even in 1945 the Soviet authorities disregarded Western complaints about the lack of free access to Hungary, which Moscow treated as its closed sphere from the outset. Characteristically, the Soviet political representative Georgii Pushkin responded to a U.S. request for civilian landing rights that it would be easier for them to get landing rights in the USSR itself. According to Kenez, Soviet leaders initially assumed that power would be shared in Eastern European states between Communist and non-Communist parties. Soviet support for the coalition government in Hungary, he argues, was genuine. “It would be a mistake to conclude...that the Russians constantly pushed the Hungarians in a radical direction. In fact the opposite is likely” (p. 50). Communist leaders took for granted that their ultimate task was to establish a Communist regime, but “from the available evidence it appears that the Soviet leadership and therefore their Hungarian inferiors expected a far longer transition period than in fact occurred.” This is not a new argument. Charles Gati presented it in 1986. But Kenez does not convincingly back it up. Neither does he support his argument that the Soviet Union never pushed the Hungarians in a radical direction. For instance, in the summer of 1945 Pushkin forced the Social Democrats to accept the Communist candidate, Sándor Rónai, for justice minister. Rónai posed as a Social Democrat but was in fact a clandestine Com- munist. Kenez recounts how after the election of 1945 Stalin instructed the Commu- nists to take over the ministry of interior. But Kenez misses an important point. Ini- tially the Communists ceded this post to the victorious Smallholders with the consent of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) chairman Kliment Voroshilov. However, Soviet leaders overruled both Voroshilov and Moscow’s Hungarian protégés and re- versed the agreement. Kenez shows how determined the Communists were to become the dominant political power. A case in point was the secret police, which “was in communist hands and...could arrest and hold in prison any one it desired without any legal niceties.” The head of the secret police was appointed by the Communist party without government control. In addition to the secret police, the other police forces were also dominated by Communists or fellow travelers. So were the local governments, which never reºected the results of the 1945 election. The ACC was crucial in the implementation of Soviet policy. Kenez writes that Voroshilov “had considerable standing in the Soviet hierarchy and personal ties with Stalin that allowed him a degree of independence” (p. 64). In reality, Voroshilov had already lost favor with Stalin, and he was overruled on at least two occasions: on the assignment of the ministry of interior and for the way he handled the rules of the 1945 election. Soviet ofªcials closely supervised every aspect of life and politics in Hungary and censored newspapers, ªlm, and radio. Lists of purportedly anti-Semitic and fascist books were compiled, and movies in which actors appeared who had allegedly collaborated with the Nazis were proscribed. The armistice also allowed the Soviet Union to collect sizable amounts of reparations. Kenez sees the unbridled collection of funds as evidence that the Soviet Union was not planning for a long stay in Hungary. Indeed some aspects of Soviet policy were chaotic; for instance, the Red Army often looted factories that were producing

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for reparations. Kenez reports that Hungary paid out $160 million to $170 million of reparations in three years, but contemporary ªgures suggest that the real ªgure was higher because of the arbitrary nature of Soviet pricing. Hungary probably serviced the $200 million owed to Moscow in three instead of six years. Kenez claims that So- viet leaders insisted on a payment of $280 million under the pretext of Hungarian debt to Germany. In reality they agreed to accept only $45 million. The Soviet authorities established joint stock companies, the general managers of which were, according to Kenez, “almost always” Soviet. But in fact the general managers were always Soviet, which meant that the companies were fully of Soviet character, as a Hungarian negotiator put it in 1949. Kenez fails to mention that the joint stock companies were established without time limitation, which in itself contradicts his argument. To- gether with a large number of fully or partially Sovietized companies, they controlled important segments of the industrial, mining, and transport sectors. Besides providing the USSR with a continual ºow of funds, these companies had full access to natural resources under colonial rules. Moreover, the Soviet companies enjoyed preferential treatment vis-à-vis Western-owned companies, some of which the Soviet forces seized for themselves. The Western companies gradually had to reduce their activities before being nationalized. In addition, the Hungarian economy was rapidly centralized under the direction of the Soviet-imposed, Communist-controlled Chief Economic Council, which formulated economic policy and identiªed property to be seized by the Soviet Union. These policies did not operate separately but as parts of a whole. Undoubtedly the 1945 elections were free and democratic. But in June 1945 Mátyás Rákosi had already disclosed that the elections would not play a signiªcant role in Soviet plans. Kenez seems to believe that Communist moderation in rhetoric was genuine, whereas leaders like Rákosi and József Révai revealed that it was only tactical. It is certainly true that in the given conditions cooperation with the Soviet Union was a realistic option. But perhaps Zoltán Tildy went too far when, frightened by the success of his own Smallholders Party in the Budapest municipal election, he offered to Voroshilov to continue the coalition government no matter what the outcome of the national election. Kenez emphasizes the lack of U.S. interest in Hungary, perhaps even overstating it a little considering George Kennan’s threatening note to Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov on 2 March 1946 concerning Hungary’s economic rehabilitation. But the Americans were discouraged by what seemed to them a policy of unconditional surrender to the Communists. The U.S. minister (not ambassador) in Hungary, H. F. Arthur Schoenfeld, was in a position to compare Hun- gary to Finland (where he had been stationed during the Winter War of 1939–1940). Making concessions to the opponent made sense until it became apparent that these concessions were one-sided. Kenez claims that Ferenc Nagy’s compromises kept alive a degree of democracy and pluralism longer than any alternative policy could have. But by the time Nagy was forced to resign in May 1947, Hungary was already a Soviet economic and military space, and the Soviet security organs were in control of police functions in Hungary. Important legislation was not even sent to parliament, and by late 1945 preliminary measures had been adopted to introduce the centralized allocation of raw materials and ªnances, paving the way for a centralized economy.

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Local governments, the police, and the judiciary were increasingly controlled by the Communist party. Party leader Rákosi made it known that if Ferenc Nagy returned he would be arrested and tried for his crimes. Kenez discusses the Communist gains in 1946 at length. But he omits evidence indicating that this year may have been crucial in the Communist seizure of power. According to the Hungarian records of the Soviet-Hungarian talks, Stalin promised to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary, leaving only a few behind. But according to the Russian transcript, which Kenez evidently did not consult, Stalin said that a part of the Soviet army would be gradually withdrawn to reduce the burden on the Hun- garian economy. The burden was indeed tremendous: Kenez emphasizes the cost of running the ACC, but the Soviet army cost much more. In fourteen months in 1946– 1947 alone, the Hungarian government paid $50 million, meaning that in the transition period the maintenance of the Soviet army alone almost doubled the reparation costs. More crucially the Soviet Army used Hungarian territory for military purposes without constraint. In January 1946, Pushkin and Sviridov warned Tildy and Nagy that they were not dealing with the reactionaries of their party rapidly enough. In March and April the government signed agreements on the joint companies. But the most important evidence missing from Kenez’s book is that after a secret meeting with Stalin, Rákosi told party leaders on 17 May that regardless of the international environment, “the creation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat” was on the agenda for parties in Eastern Europe. In Hungary, he added, the Communist and Social Demo- cratic parties must be merged because “there is not a social democrat in the world who would say that the road the Soviet Union embarked on in 1917 was incorrect.” Rákosi also disclosed that a new Communist International would be set up after the elections in Western Europe and the signing of the peace treaties. This announcement came well over a year before the meeting at Szklarska Porèba in September 1947 from which, as Kenez writes, the Hungarian delegates returned with the understanding that “they no longer had to be concerned about the Western response” and “could proceed in building a Soviet style one-party system” (p. 264). The most original parts of the book are devoted to Communist mass mobilization, propaganda, and cultural politics. The Communists were able to win over a relatively sizable part of the population, including survivors of the Holocaust who hoped that socialism would eradicate ethnic prejudices. The Communists made a strong but ultimately failed effort to penetrate the countryside, sending agitators and village edu- cators even to the remotest village. As Kenez points out, the power of propaganda is limited when it is aimed at bringing people over to a worldview that is hostile to them. Mass organizations that falsely pretended to be autonomous were set up to penetrate society and tailor the Communist message to different groups. Trade unions were rapidly wrested from the Social Democrats. The Women’s Democratic Association sought to win over a group reluctant to vote for radical policies. The Communists at- tributed particular signiªcance to organizing young people via a putatively nonparti- san organization that was actually controlled by the Communists behind the scenes. Prominent non-Communists worked in the leadership of another front organiza-

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tion, the Hungarian-Soviet Cultural Society, which was entrusted with the dissemina- tion of Soviet culture. This proved to be a thankless task. No one turned up to watch Soviet ªlms, even though, with Soviet help, the Communists gained control of the largest and most desirable cinemas in Budapest. The Communist-controlled ªlm company Maªrt was supposed to make a proªt for the party, but by showing Soviet- made ªlms it lost money. Even party members were averse to the Soviet ªlms. The failure of Soviet “soft power,” as Kenez shows, was manifold. The unpopularity of Communism and of the Soviet Union and its occupation policy, the Hungarian dis- like of Russians, and the alien nature of Soviet cultural products all contributed. So- viet ofªcials failed to comprehend the Hungarian Communists’ problems in promoting Soviet-made ªlms, claiming that even the worst Soviet ªlm was better than the best American ªlm. Ultimately the Soviet authorities even accused their Hungarian allies of sabotage. In the concluding chapter, Kenez writes that the Communist leaders “were utterly subservient to a foreign power to the extent of being unable to imagine that the interests of Hungary and international communism might not coincide” (p. 291). This is true with some qualiªcations. In 1947 Communist leaders backed the Smallholders’ effort to reduce Soviet claims concerning Hungarian debt to Germany. In 1949 they successfully resisted the partial integration of the Soviet and the Hungar- ian economies. Although this is not “the ªrst book in a Western language to describe in detail the establishment of the communist regime in Hungary,” as the publisher claims, the chapters concerning Communist propaganda, mass mobilization, and cultural policies are important contributions to our understanding of this crucial period. When the process started and why it happened will remain a topic of debate, but in light of evidence presented by Kenez and of other evidence not presented in the book his contention that initially a far longer transition period was envisioned is questionable.

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Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 313 pp. $28.00.

Reviewed by J. Ransom Clark, Muskingum College

To a reviewer whose knowledge of the controversy that has swirled around Soviet State Security (KGB) defector Yuri Nosenko for nearly ªve decades comes only through the extensive open literature—including Gordon Brook-Shepard, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post-War Defectors (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989); Edward Jay Epstein, De- ception: The Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1989); Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York: Reader’s Digest/McGraw Hill, 1978); John Limond Hart, The CIA’s Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003); Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Je- sus Angleton, The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Da-

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vid C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); and David Wise, Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA (New York: Ran- dom House, 1992)—an initial question is whether the subject warrants another retell- ing. If the author were anyone but Tennent (“Pete”) Bagley, the answer is probably not. However, Bagley is one of the individuals most closely associated with the Nosenko case in its earliest phases, from Nosenko’s initial contacts with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1962 to his defection in 1964 and the CIA’s decision to interrogate him in isolation for a period that eventually lasted over three years. The centerpiece around which Spy Wars revolves is Bagley’s argument that Nosenko was not what he said he was—a legitimate KGB defector—and that he was part of a KGB deception scheme designed to provide cover for Soviet penetrations of U.S. intelligence agencies and the country’s secure communications systems. Bagley provides brief outlines of other Russian/Soviet deception operations over time (beginning with the Tsarist-era Okhrana). However, these vignettes seem to exist primarily to illustrate the extent of the Soviet Union’s commitment to deception activities and to lay a foundation for his argument against Nosenko. Counterintelligence work has been variously described as a maze, a labyrinth, and a wilderness of mirrors. Bagley’s theory of the Nosenko case ªts any of these char- acterizations. The Nosenko saga really begins with an earlier defection—that of KGB Major Anatolii Golitsyn—in late 1961. Golitsyn’s ideas about Soviet penetrations and deception activities became the touchstone for a group of CIA ofªcers in both the agency’s Soviet operations division and its counterintelligence staff. Golitsyn’s warning that his defection would be followed by false defections intended to divert attention from his uncovering of Soviet spies formed a backdrop for assessing Nosenko and his information. When Bagley returned to CIA headquarters in June 1962 after multiple meetings in Geneva with Nosenko, who claimed to need money to replenish funds spent on high living, he believed he had important information from a serving KGB ofªcer. Disillusionment began when James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, showed him Golitsyn’s ªle. The parallel yet conºicting reporting of the two defectors raised concerns that Nosenko might be a KGB plant dispensing disinformation. When Nosenko resurfaced in January 1964, Bagley returned to Geneva. Nosenko promptly announced his intention to defect and dropped another bombshell. He claimed to have personally handled Lee Harvey Oswald’s KGB ªle. Even more, Nosenko stated ºatly that the KGB had had no interest in the future assassin while he was living in the Soviet Union. Over time, even Nosenko’s supporters have tended to downplay, rather than to defend, his claims with regard to Oswald. After Nosenko was moved to the United States, the debrieªng of the defector increasingly became a hostile interrogation. Contradictions and anomalies in his statements created new levels of concern for Bagley and the Soviet division leadership. Bagley’s recitation of events makes it plain that the driver of the handling of Nosenko was the CIA’s Soviet division and not James Angleton, as is often argued. In April 1964 the CIA received consent from Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to continue to hold Nosenko for questioning. This extrajudicial imprisonment eventually

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stretched not just weeks, as the attorney general presumably assumed, but into months and then years. Even under these conditions, Nosenko never broke and told his jailers what they wanted to hear. Changes in CIA management within the division and at higher levels led to multiple reviews of Nosenko’s situation. He was ªnally released after more than three years of conªnement, ofªcially rehabilitated, and even given a CIA contract as a consultant. Bagley’s disparagement of the CIA ofªcers who performed these reviews is one of the uglier aspects of Spy Wars. Calling into question in the harshest possible language the motives and honesty of CIA colleagues who did not accept his analysis of Nosenko does not serve Bagley well. Given Bagley’s direct participation until reassignment overseas in 1967, it is good for the record to have his ªrsthand version of this long-standing dispute. He writes well and marshals his arguments tellingly. However, he has essentially prepared a brief against Nosenko as a false defector sent by the KGB to divert the CIA’s attention from “moles” within its ranks. He makes little acknowledgment of alternative explanations for the events he depicts. He leaves room for asking whether some of the dots he con- nects even belong in the picture. In the end, whether Bagley moves us any closer to the “truth” is as much in doubt as his view of Nosenko’s bona ªdes. Even accepting that Bagley clearly believes he has been badly portrayed in other renditions of the Nosenko story, the depth of his bitterness is jarringly evident throughout his narrative. The most likely outcome from publication of Bagley’s work is a reheating of the rhetoric from both sides of the dispute as CIA ofªcers long retired seek to argue the correctness of decisions made a long time ago.

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Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 265 pp.

Reviewed by Qiang Zhai, Auburn University at Montgomery

Ho Chi Minh has remained a shadowy individual for a long time. Vietnamese ofªcial chronicles tend to eulogize him as a statesman totally devoted to the reuniªcation and independence of his country. These accounts offer few details about Ho Chi Minh’s private emotions and life and are intended to preserve Ho’s ofªcial image as “Uncle Ho,” a selºess national leader completely dedicated to the interests and well-being of his compatriots. Ho Chi Minh’s detractors, however, tend to condemn him as a brutal, cold-blooded dictator intent on imposing a Stalinist gulag on Vietnam. Pierre Brocheux’s biography, ªrst published in French in 2003, is scholarly and judicious and is a much-needed antidote to the prejudiced and stereotyped views of Ho Chi Minh. Brocheux has made good use of the Vietnamese and Chinese documents available up to 2003 to craft a balanced, convincing portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Echoing the judgment of William Duiker (an earlier biographer of Ho Chi Minh), who called Ho “half Lenin and half Gandhi,” Brocheux also compares Ho Chi

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Minh to Gandhi, praising both men for possessing “the same calm audacity” (p. 178) to demand independence from colonial powers. What motivated Ho Chi Minh? On this critical question, Brocheux’s answer is insightful. He attributes Ho’s activities to two intellectual wellsprings: Confucian humanism and Marxist-Leninist Commu- nism. According to Brocheux, “Ho was also steeped in the perennial Sino-Vietnamese philosophy that blended Confucianism...with Buddhism and Taoism. In sum, Ho retained his original education and then closely linked it with Leninist theory, which essentially deªnes the strategy and tactics of revolution and the taking of political power” (pp. 185–186). Brocheux’s analysis of the impact of the Sino-Soviet split on the leadership of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) is fascinating. He demonstrates that the Sino- Soviet dispute triggered intense debate within the VWP Politburo about the correct position to assume and that Ho Chi Minh preferred to maintain an equal balance between China and the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, according to Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh and his conªdence man, Vo Nguyen Giap, were actually relegated to the sidelines by the leading trio of Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, and Nguyen Chi Thanh, who controlled the Politburo. Citing Chinese sources, Brocheux describes the Chinese reaction to Ho Chi Minh’s mediation effort in the Sino-Soviet rift: Liu Shaoqi criticized Ho as a “rightist.” The lack of further documents renders some of Brocheux’s treatments fragmen- tary and incomplete. For instance, he mentions that Ho Chi Minh’s last trip to the So- viet Union was in 1961, but he does not explain the purposes and results of the visit. Since the original publication of Brocheux’s volume in 2003, fresh documents have emerged from the archives of the former Communist governments in Eastern Europe. These materials shed new light on the dilemma that the VWP confronted when the Sino-Soviet quarrel escalated and on the marginalization of Ho Chi Minh within the VWP ruling circle. On the issue of Ho Chi Minh’s last trip to the Soviet Union in 1961, which Brocheux mentions but fails to elaborate, new East European documents provide clues. According to recently declassiªed Albanian documents (as translated and published in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin), Ho Chi Minh traveled to Moscow in the summer of 1961 to mediate the Soviet-Albanian dispute. The Chinese opposed Ho’s efforts, blaming him for not standing ªrm against Soviet revisionism. Ho’s 1961 Moscow journey was a continuation of his attempt to restore unity within the international Communist camp, a project that he launched in the summer of 1960 when he visited both China and the Soviet Union in an attempt to patch up the differences between the two Communist giants. The Albanian documents indicate that the Chinese were fully aware of the split within the VWP leadership on the issue of anti-revisionism and that they informed the Albanians that Ho Chi Minh’s views did not represent the opinion of the VWP Politburo. The text is marred by a few factual and spelling errors. For instance, Brocheux claims that in early 1950 Ho Chi Minh traveled from Beijing to Moscow with Zhou Enlai. In fact, Zhou Enlai arrived in Moscow ªrst, and Ho Chi Minh joined him and Mao there later. Chinese adviser Luo Guibo is misspelled as Lui Ribo (p. 142). The caption to photograph 9 mentions Dong Biwu (the name is also misspelled as Tong

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Ping Wu) as being in the background, but he is not actually shown there. In an endnote, Brocheux points out that the land reform campaign in China has been well chronicled by historians, but “there is no equivalent study regarding Vietnam” (p. 234). In fact, Edwin Moise has produced a thorough examination of the Vietnam- ese land reform program. Despite these quibbles, Brocheux’s study remains a concise, informative, and well-written account of a man whose life and career have long been shrouded in myth.

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Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 370 pp.

Reviewed by Lowell Dittmer, University of California at Berkeley

This is a book that deªes easy categorization; it addresses the post-Mao transformation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) introduced by Deng Xiaoping and his supporters at the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress in December 1978 known as “reform and opening to the outside world,” but it is not a narrative history of the reform movement, nor is it a critique. Instead, it is a considered appraisal, from an ideological perspective, of what has happened to Chinese socialism under reform and where it is going. Thus the book is partly descriptive and partly advocacy, criticizing Chinese reform in light of socialist norms that are at the same time also in question. The structure of Lin Chun’s book is topical rather than chronological. The ªrst chapter situates China’s socialist modernization in the context of imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism, in which China’s project emerges as an attempt to forge an alternative model of modernity, a model that despite its pragmatic ºexibility is thus far still unique in the world, adhering neither to the Eastern European socialist reform experience nor to post-Soviet reforms. The second chapter analyzes the political economy of Chinese socialist reform with regard to the impact of marketization and pri- vatization on class stratiªcation, gender equality, and geographic inequality. Chapters three and four turn to the question of political transformation. In deªance of the prevailing assumption that Chinese reform is exclusively economic, Lin ªnds in her discussion of “people’s democracy” that profound changes have occurred in relations between the Chinese masses and the state but that China is moving not toward any Western conception of liberal democracy but toward a more holistic, corporate vision of democracy consistent with Chinese political cultural tradition. The concluding chapter is even more broadly gauged, addressing the periodic readjustments of Chi- nese reform policy over the decades in the pursuit of xiaokang socialism and “responsi- ble great-power” status in the wake of ever-greater ecological and demographic crises. The organization of arguments within each of these broadly thematic chapters is allusive and discursive rather than logically deductive. Lin, a lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science whose previous work includes a book on the British New Left, attempts to situate Chinese reform socialism in the context not

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only of the academic literature on recent Chinese politics, in which she is well versed, but also in the context of the last two centuries of Chinese history and of Western philosophical and intellectual currents. These juxtapositions and comparisons are often insightful, even erudite, but the narrative moves forward and backward in time and space with such dizzying swiftness that the thread of the argument can easily be lost. Thus a not atypical page (p. 89) reºects on the current market transition in the light of the Qing reformers’ “Westernization movement” (yangwu yundong), the opium wars, and Barrington Moore’s comparative analysis of class structure and revolution. Or later (p. 110) Lin leaps from a discussion of Taiwan qua Republic of China to Confucian China, U.S. interventionism in the Taiwan Strait, PRC policy toward ethnic and religious minorities, different conceptions of federalism, Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles, economic and ideological globalization, Wilsonian principles of self-determination, and so forth. These discussions, further complicated by Lin’s love for contradictions, rhetorical questions, and counterfactual propositions, might be deemed useful for lifting broad and lasting issues from the jumbled Chinese experience and pondering their historical ramiªcations. Yet, aside from displaying allusive brilliance and an insight into every possible perspective on a given phenomenon, it is often unclear exactly what Lin ªnally wishes to assert. Thus, on the one hand readers are once again given statistical reasons to be impressed by the economic achievements of Chinese socialism over the past three decades. On the other hand the contrast between post-Mao reform and Maoist modernization is deemed to be over- drawn, and reform is said to have led to gross ecological and distributive distortions. On the one hand the inequality accompanying reformist modernization is deplored (e.g., on p. 8 Lin notes that the Gini coefªcient of household income jumped from 0.33 in 1980 to 0.454 in 2003); on the other hand Martin Whyte is cited in defense of the proposition that marketization causes not increasing inequality but a replace- ment of one set of criteria (bureaucratic) for inequality by another (market) (p. 95). Despite Lin’s illuminating discussion of socialist feminism, this reader could not tell whether she thinks reform has enhanced the position of women, or indeed whether the Cultural Revolution was a disaster or a mass movement with many redeeming qualities. To be sure, the confusion may be the fault of the reviewer rather than the author, who is simply trying to give due consideration to every side of such questions. If one tries to sift through the multitude of qualiªcations and counterthrusts, the gist of the book seems to be a defense of a unique form of Chinese socialism that represents the maturation of a coherent, consistent national and social identity over time. Lin sees the forces of Westernization and globalization as an inherent threat to this identity that cannot be rejected toto caelo but must be resisted with some ideological discrimination, and she believes that China, after a period of reformist excess in the 1980s, is returning to its revolutionary ideals (graced by a higher consciousness of social justice, social harmony, and environmental balance) under the current leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Whether that is empirically true is still debatable, but surely it is an argument well worth making.

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Alan Armstrong, Preemptive Strike: The Secret Plan That Would Have Prevented the At- tack on Pearl Harbor. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2006. 285 pp. $22.95.

Reviewed by Michael Schaller, University of Arizona

In approximately 200 pages of breathless prose followed by a series of unusual appen- dixes and citations, attorney, amateur historian, and self-described air war buff Alan Armstrong describes the operational aspects of a secret war plan conceived by a strange alliance of Chinese Nationalist diplomats, American mercenaries, and Roose- velt administration “insiders” in 1940–1941. Known as JB 355 (after the Army-Navy Joint Board that preceded the creation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), this scheme as ap- proved in July 1941 envisioned the transfer of several dozen medium-range bombers to a Chinese front corporation with funding provided in part by Lend-Lease. Mem- bers of the American Volunteer Group (AVG) led by former Army pilot Claire Chennault, who worked for China, would ºy the planes on a series of incendiary raids against Japan. Chinese ofªcials saw this as retaliation for the brutal war waged by Ja- pan since 1937, and the plan’s American boosters apparently believed that the attacks would deter wider Japanese aggression without provoking a direct response against the United States. For a variety of reasons, including a shortage of aircraft, bureaucratic snafus, and opposition from Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, the transfer of bombers was delayed, and the plan was eventually overtaken by Japan’s own preemptive attack of 7 December 1941. Examining this case of the “dog that didn’t bark,” Armstrong ªnds much that is interesting in this episode and explores it from a largely technical point of view. For reasons that are not always apparent to the reader, he believes that this plan, which he erroneously claims was lost in dusty archives until his detective work unearthed it, might not only have succeeded in upsetting Japan’s attack plan against Pearl Harbor but can serve as a model of preemptive military action in the 21st century. Along the way, Armstrong hints at, but does not quite buy into, the old canard that Franklin Roosevelt was looking for a “back door to war” and that the JB 355 plan might have served that purpose. Perhaps some caution is in order. First of all, this is not really news. In the past 25 years, several authors, including this reviewer and historian William Leary, have written extensively about Chennault’s air war plans before and after Pearl Harbor. Biogra- phers of some of the other players, such as Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and presidential adviser Lauchlin Currie, have also explored the episode at length. None of this extensive scholarship, nor the wider academic scholarship on U.S.-Japanese diplomatic and military relations, is reºected in Armstrong’s book. Instead, he offers many citations to websites created by armchair strategists, to e-mail messages from persons claiming secret information, and to History Channel television documentaries. In fact, Stimson and Marshall were perceptive in their critical evaluation of this

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loopy war plan. Although both Morgenthau and Currie were dedicated and well in- tentioned (despite later attacks on their loyalty), they were completely out of their depth in playing armchair air strategists. Had Chennault actually gotten hold of the bombers, he would have attacked Japan and almost certainly provoked a Japanese military attack. True, some of the battleships at Pearl Harbor and their crews might have been saved by an earlier war, but those vessels had little impact on the way the war actually developed. A Japanese offensive in Southeast Asia, whether begun in November rather than in December 1941, would probably have achieved identical results. Armstrong is also way off base in praising Chennault’s purported later accom- plishments in China as head of the tiny 14th Air Force. Although Chennault’s actions were hyped by publicists such as Joseph Alsop, his attacks on Japanese shipping, troop concentrations, and supply depots had only a modest impact. When it appeared in 1944 that these attacks might become more effective, Japanese ground troops launched a massive offensive that almost overran Nationalist China. Nearly a year of massive strategic bombing was required to bring Japan to its knees. The 1941 plan, like Chennault’s fantasies of 1942–1944, fed into his own ego and pleased his Guomindang patrons but had little basis in reality. Had Armstrong familiarized himself with some standard histories of the period, he might have gained a broader perspective. Finally, what ties this book to the larger history of the Cold War? Well, several things actually, but Armstrong has missed them. Chennault and several of his key American and Guomindang backers established a series of CIA “front” airlines in post-1945 East Asia, the most famous of which became Air America. The secret methods and some of the personal contacts hatched in 1941 had a resonance in the Chi- nese Civil War, the Korean War, and, most dramatically, Vietnam. Also, some of the principals, such as Lauchlin Currie, were later accused of being Soviet spies in New Deal and wartime Washington. Armstrong disposes of this in a footnote. Yet, the evidence against Currie in the Venona papers and in documents from the former Soviet foreign intelligence archives leave some questions open. Without doubt, he passed on information to Americans who were feeding data to the Soviet Union. But the extent and motivation of his actions, as well as their impact, are unclear. Armstrong claims, incorrectly, that Currie was unmasked as a spy in the 1950s and ºed the United States for Colombia. In fact, he voluntarily moved to Colombia to work for the government there in economic planning and several times openly returned to the United States. He was never charged with illegal activities, perhaps because the government did not want to disclose the Venona decrypts. Currie played a major role in wartime China policy, but his support for the Nationalist regime rose and fell in pretty much the same rhythm as did that of most of his contemporaries. One did not have to be on the So- viet Union’s payroll to hope that China would be a useful force against Japan if supported generously by the United States and to then experience disillusionment at the squalid reality of Guomindang behavior. Ultimately, this book has little new or different to say about America’s entry into the Second World War, the logic of preemptive war, or how the plans and personali- ties of wartime Washington washed over into the early Cold War.

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Michael Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008. 266 pp.

Reviewed by Jorge I. Domínguez, Harvard University

What explained the likelihood of U.S. intervention in Latin America during the Cold War? Michael Grow initially set out to examine the relative inºuence of economic and security factors in such interventions but soon concluded that neither of these explanations was persuasive. Instead, he argues, the explanation for these U.S. interventions encompassed “three entirely different factors—U.S. international credibility, U.S. domestic politics, and lobbying by Latin American and Caribbean political actors” (p. xi). Grow organizes his book into eight chapters, each of which features a case study of U.S. intervention: Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, British Guiana in 1963, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Chile in 1970, Nicaragua in 1981, Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989. Each of these chapters presents an admirable summary of the respective case. Yet, Grow emphasizes that his intention is not simply to provide “a descriptive history of the interventions themselves,” and he refers readers who seek detailed accounts of such interventions to the works of others. Rather, his book is “about causation and causation alone” during the “interventionist decision-making process” (p. xiii). It is a tribute to Grow’s impressive scholarly achievement in this book that he does in fact present excellent descriptive histories of the interventions themselves. Moreover, he organizes each empirical chapter analytically, which greatly facilitates comparisons across the cases. In each chapter, Grow systematically explores highly detailed evidence to shed light on the relative importance of the ªve arguments that are at the heart of his analysis; namely, economic, security, credibility, domestic politics, and Latin American lobbying. Grow is also an excellent writer and a polished story- teller, all of which make his book valuable for scholars, students, and other interested readers. For a book about causation, however, Grow devotes remarkably few pages to the comparative analytical task—ªve pages in the preface and ten pages in the conclusions. He never addresses the most common objection to a research design of this type; namely, the selection bias on the dependent variable. He has selected for study only cases that resulted in a U.S. intervention. Each empirical chapter serves as parallel empirical demonstration of the same points; namely, the relative unimportance of economic and security factors and the greater salience of Grow’s three preferred explanations. Yet, the history of the same years is full of examples that did not lead to U.S. intervention, even though they shared some of the traits of the cases that did lead to such intervention. For example, in the early 1950s revolutionary situations developed in Guatemala and Bolivia. The United States acted to overthrow the revolutionary

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leaders in Guatemala but worked out a mutually satisfactory accommodation with Bolivia. Let us stipulate, as Grow does, that neither economic nor security factors mattered in either case. Even so, the Bolivian case, no less than the Guatemalan case, sent international signals about U.S. credibility and was affected by the lobbying of dis- placed elites in Bolivia. Why the difference in the likelihood of U.S. forcible intervention? Consider a second example. A left-wing military regime headed by General Juan Velasco was in power in Peru at the very time the U.S. government began to engineer its intervention against Chile’s President Salvador Allende. This Peruvian government had much more extensive military relations with the Soviet Union than Allende’s Chile ever did and purchased considerable Soviet military equipment. Hundreds of Soviet military trainers were deployed to Peru. The Peruvian government expropriated many U.S. and other international ªrms. At the time of Allende’s overthrow, Peru had negotiated fewer compensation agreements with expropriated ªrms than had Chile. Why did it serve U.S. international credibility to accommodate Velasco’s Peru but not Salvador Allende’s Chile? In these two pairs of cases, one might argue that part of the difference was ideology. U.S. Cold War elites would intervene in Latin America when they perceived a “threat of Communism” but would not if incumbent Latin American elites preferred other ideological anthems or colors, regardless of their property expropriations or even close military relations with the USSR. This ideological explanation is as good a guide to all of Grow’s cases as are Grow’s arguments, but the ideological explanation also handles the distinction between intervention and two important non-intervention cases. Yet, ideology alone is not an explanatory “magic bullet.” Think about events in 1961. Why did the U.S. government that year simultaneously seek to overthrow the governments of Fidel Castro in Cuba and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, in each case hatching or supporting assassination plots? The Trujillo assassination occurred during the years of the Cold War. Do Grow’s explanations apply to the assassination of non-Communist Trujillo? Or take the Panama case, which Grow examines for 1989 (arguably no longer during the Cold War). Panamanians rioted and embar- rassed the U.S. government many times during the years of the Cold War, sometimes with the encouragement of Panamanian governments. What distinguishes those epi- sodes in Panama when the U.S. government deployed troops from those when it did not? Why was U.S. credibility tested in 1989 and only in 1989? Finally, at the start of the Reagan administration, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig famously pro- claimed that the U.S. government was pondering “going to the source” (i.e., Cuba) as it sought to shape its response to the manifold violent crises in Central America. Why did the Reagan administration not go after Cuba at that time? Could “security issues” have mattered in this case, namely, successful deterrence by the Soviet Union and Cuba of possible U.S. actions against Cuba? There are, to be sure, plausible answers to these questions. The suggested alternative explanation for some cases (ideology) may be inaccurate or insufªcient. But the pertinent necessary analysis is not to be found in this book because Grow chose his

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cases to exhibit analytical similarity and expunge variation. Absent variation on the dependent variable—the likelihood of intervention, yes or no—Grow’s book does not carry out its self-appointed task: it does not explain causation. What he does give us, however, is an admirable set of descriptive cases, cogently and insightfully presented, and more tools in the explanatory toolkit, the utility of which others may assess in future research. On these grounds, it is a truly splendid book.

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Darren G. Hawkins, International Human Rights and Authoritarian Rule in Chile. Lin- coln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 259 pp.

Reviewed by Paul W. Drake, University of California at San Diego

Darren G. Hawkins addresses one of the most controversial issues and cases during the Cold War: the impact of international human-rights pressures on the authoritarian regime in Chile. The Cold War helped bring to power and justify the anti-Marxist dictator General Augusto Pinochet in 1973, and the denouement of that global conºict helped bring him down in 1990. During his reign, an unprecedented human- rights campaign pushed his seemingly impregnable government toward gradual liberalization. To what extent that “soft” campaign managed to open up Pinochet’s “hard” regime is the question addressed in this book. The answers have profound implications for policies toward similar tyrants around the world. Hawkins spans international relations and comparative politics. Following the lead of Kathryn Sikkink and other political scientists interested in the recent interna- tionalization of human-rights standards, he challenges some international relations theories that underestimate the inºuence of ideas as opposed to military and economic might. He stresses the clout of state and non-state actors advocating universal codes of conduct for government behavior. He also argues that these global norms played a bigger role than some domestic factors in pressing Pinochet to accept some human-rights considerations. Although Hawkins may understate the importance of national forces, he lends credence to scholars who highlight the international causes of the tidal wave of democratization—and indeed the thawing of the Cold War—from the 1980s through the 1990s. He qualiªes that interpretation by showing under what international and domestic conditions those currents from overseas might succeed in reducing human-rights violations. Hawkins’s persuasive central contention is that some autocracies are susceptible to human-rights demands, even when unaccompanied by signiªcant military or economic sanctions, because those criticisms undermine their international legitimacy. In the same way that even the most brutal dictators ªnd it easier to govern with some domestic consent to their right to rule, so, too, they ªnd it easier to manage international relations with some foreign acceptance of their propriety in ofªce. To produce alter- ations in repressive strategies in the Chilean case, transnational assaults on human-

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rights abuses had to be tenacious. They also had to coincide with national democratic traditions and a rule-oriented dictatorship in pursuit of legitimacy. Hawkins casts his study in the framework of international relations theories. He notes that the power differential between the countries promoting human rights and those transgressing them is not the crucial variable. He hypothesizes that the leverage of human-rights initiatives from abroad will increase when the pressure is massive and sustained. Such initiatives are also more likely to succeed when they interact with a domestic regime that is receptive to society and its critics, is dominated by rule makers rather than by arbitrary enforcers, is faced with no grave economic or security crisis, and is entrenched in a country with a democratic tradition. In his view, the last three domestic factors accounted for the Chilean tyranny’s concern about the threat to its legitimacy from relentless human-rights advocates. Chile makes an excellent test case because of the ferocity and durability of Pinochet’s regime and because of the extraordinary international condemnation of its atrocities. The breadth and intensity of international revulsion at the overthrow of So- cialist President Salvador Allende (1970–1973) and at Pinochet’s subsequent atrocities are partly attributable to Chile’s long democratic history. Hawkins provides a concise and cogent narrative of the evolution of the military government. He convincingly shows how its cosmetic or limited liberalization over time responded to external de- nunciations of the murder, disappearance, torture, imprisonment, exile, and general repression of its opponents. Hawkins’s main examples of Pinochet’s reactions to international excoriation are the junta’s consternation over human-rights charges in 1973– 1975, the dissolution of the original secret police apparatus in 1977, the installation of a constitution in 1980, and the convening and losing of a plebiscite on the continuation of the dictatorship in 1988, which resulted in the restoration of democracy. For each event, Hawkins persuasively argues that alternative explanations for the Chilean government’s behavior are insufªcient without the human-rights variable. Even when Pinochet’s reforms did not immediately or intentionally improve human rights, they laid the groundwork for eventual advances. Indeed, rule-oriented leaders of the armed forces and their civilian allies became so dedicated to the legitimacy of their political and economic system that they were willing to leave ofªce in order to preserve it at the end of the 1980s. Hawkins underscores the emblematic stature of the Chilean case by discussing the pioneering international efforts to prosecute Pinochet after the return to democracy in 1990. Although his assessment of Chile’s authoritarian period does not signiªcantly differ from that of other authors, he gives greater priority to the role of transnational human-rights networks. In the concluding chapter, Hawkins validates his analysis of Chile by brieºy con- trasting it with the experiences of Cuba and South Africa. From 1960 to the present, Cuba illustrated the ability of domestic obstacles to thwart human-rights pressures. From 1960 to 1994, South Africa demonstrated the capacity of changing domestic circumstances to enhance the resonance of human-rights complaints. All three cases ªt the author’s theoretical construct. Hawkins erects his scholarly ediªce on a sturdy foundation of secondary and primary research. He relies on a vast array of academic sources as well as newspapers, re-

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ports of human-rights lobbyists, government documents, and interviews with key actors on all sides. Most impressive is his use of formerly secret records of the Chilean dictatorship’s leaders and meetings to demonstrate their concern about and rejoinders to human-rights attacks from national and international adversaries. Hawkins’s book will also be well received because of the clarity of his concepts, arguments, and prose. He offers objective evaluations of the veracity of his approach compared to competitors. His attractive model should be debated and applied to other cases. It is also to be hoped that Hawkins’s ªndings about the power of transnational human-rights efforts will prove to be true in other countries in which the necessary conditions prevail.

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John P. Hawkins, Army of Hope, Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001. 368 pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by Anni Baker, Wheaton College

Anthropologist and career Army Reserve ofªcer John P. Hawkins has produced a study of U.S. Army communities in West Germany during the 1980s, a decade of achievement for the Army as it went from a demoralized and cynical “hollow force” to perhaps the best combat force in U.S. history. In spite of the Army’s success in turning itself around, Hawkins paints a gloomy picture of military life in Army of Hope, Army of Alienation. He suggests that soldiers and their families began their assignments in Germany with enthusiasm but that differences between civilian values of individual- ism, privacy, and freedom and those of army culture—group identity, hierarchy, and obedience—spawned discontent and alienation. Hawkins served on active duty in West Germany from 1986 to 1988, during which time he interviewed soldiers and family members living in a pseudonymous military community. He characterizes his subjects as motivated, ambitious, and ready to make sacriªces for what they saw as a vital mission. He then details the many ways the Army abused this reservoir of good will, beginning with the transfer to West Ger- many. The move was stressful, Hawkins writes, because the Army did not do enough to prepare and support families and allowed the process to become unnecessarily difªcult and confusing. The Army created a poor ªrst impression that tended to lin- ger, and those who were stationed in West Germany for a year or more passed on their bitter experience to newcomers. As Hawkins puts it, “the anxious were socialized by the disgruntled” (p. 63). When they arrived in West Germany, Army personnel found themselves in a community with no separation between work and private life. Ofªcers spent an inor- dinate amount of time on family matters: “trafªc tickets, notices of overdue library books, bank problems, German landlord grievances—all crossed the commander’s desk,” Hawkins writes (p. 155). But because most Americans had no knowledge of

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German language or culture, they generally did not venture into the local community. The Army promised that it would “take care of its own,” providing beneªts like housing, health care, childcare, shopping, and recreation. Unfortunately, Hawkins discovered, the Army often failed to live up to its commitments. Family members angrily described to him inadequate and even dangerously deªcient support services. Hawkins is thorough and sympathetic in detailing the unique stresses of Army life overseas, but his book raises many questions. First is the issue of context. As a work of anthropology, not history, the book examines military society in West Ger- many during a particular time, but its conclusions are less insightful than they might have been if they were ªrmly placed in the context of historical trends. For instance, Hawkins discusses the unappealing plight of military spouses, mostly women, who re- sented their dependence on their active-duty sponsors. This resentment may be un- derstandable, but it should be viewed in the context of women’s changing roles in the 1980s, a decade in which the efforts of ªrst-wave feminists were coming to fruition. Young spouses in the Army of the 1980s confronted a system set up in the 1950s and earlier. Army spouses in the 1950s reacted to their status differently. Likewise, Hawkins does not discuss the impact of the “new Cold War” of the 1980s precipitated by the modernization of both missile forces deployed by the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The tension that added urgency to the job in the 1980s was not “typical” of the Cold War military in West Germany. Instead, it was the product of a speciªc time and set of circumstances. But if this is the quibbling of a historian, another question concerns methodology. Hawkins does not explain how or why he chose his interviewees, nor does he describe his interview protocol or consider important quantitative studies of military communities in Germany, including several large-scale surveys conducted by the Army itself. In fact, Hawkins’s method seems to be similar to the impressionistic style of journalists who have written about life in the armed forces. Although the book provides interesting reading, one of the problems of examining the armed forces in this way is the notorious propensity of military people to gripe and grumble. Anyone who has been in the armed forces knows this, and Hawkins surely does. too. But because he does not discuss his methodology in detail or take account of historical or quantitative analysis, it is not clear whether he has considered the possible distortion of his data. In addition, Hawkins does not provide a sense of the military community he is studying compared to others in West Germany, Europe, or other overseas locations. There may be unique or unusual factors about this community that inºuence its level of morale for better or worse. The picture is overwhelmingly negative: resentment, alienation, isolation, and stress. One wonders why anyone would make the Army a career. But many people did, and Hawkins does not explain why or how so many men and women adapted and even thrived in the Army. For all the questions his book raises, however, his portrayal will be familiar to anyone who lived and worked in the Army during the last years of the Cold War and will be even more familiar to those in the Army today.

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David Christopher Arnold, Spying from Space: Constructing America’s Satellite Com- mand and Control Systems. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. 209 pp. $48.00.

Reviewed by James David, Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum

Although much has been written about the CORONA photoreconnaissance satellites since the program’s declassiªcation in 1995, very little has been published on the ground-based command-and-control network that was essential to their success, a network operated by the Air Force Satellite Control Facility (AFSCF). Without the AFSCF’s radars for tracking, antennas for receiving telemetry and sending commands, computers for processing data, and trained personnel to operate the equipment, the satellites would have been useless objects in orbit. David Christopher Arnold, an active-duty Air Force ofªcer, goes a long way in ªlling this gap with Spying from Space. Beginning with an overview of the system’s origins in the studies of RAND and others, the book next focuses on the planning, construction, and operation of the earliest stations in 1958–1960 to serve the nascent CORONA program. Arnold then details the network’s growth and transformation in the 1960s that enabled it to service other reconnaissance satellites in addition to CORONA. Changes in the system during the following decades are only brieºy described. A key strength of the book is its analysis of AFSCF’s relationships with other Air Force components, contractors, and agencies. One signiªcant early controversy concerned who would manage the system, the Strategic Air Force Command (a combat command and one user of the CORONA product) or a service organization. In the end, a new service command received the assignment. Tensions also emerged at the highest levels between the Air Force and the chief contractors, Lockheed and Philco, over stafªng of the network’s stations. The Air Force wanted to use its own personnel exclusively to maintain and operate the stations, whereas the two ªrms insisted that their employees must also participate in day-to-day operations. Because of the personnel demands of the Vietnam War, difªculties in training and retaining qualiªed opera- tors, and other factors, the stations were never staffed entirely with “blue-suiters.” This arrangement, however, rarely caused problems, and civil-military relations at the stations were for the most part professional and close. Perhaps the most crucial relationships were with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and, beginning in 1961, with the newly established National Reconnaissance Ofªce (NRO). The CIA provided much of AFSCF’s funding and was heavily involved in CORONA’s development and operations, and the NRO had management responsibility for the National Reconnaissance Program, which encompassed all reconnaissance satellites and strategic reconnaissance aircraft. As a result, the AFSCF served both organizations. The bitter battles in the early 1960s over the NRO’s attempts to decrease CIA participation in the covert programs placed the AFSCF in a difªcult position. Against this backdrop, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in November 1963 ordered that the AFSCF be consolidated with the two missile range organizations into a new National Range

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Division under the Air Force. The NRO vigorously opposed the incorporation, be- lieving that the AFSCF should remain independent because of its critical role in the National Reconnaissance Program. Within the Air Force, the AFSCF and the Space Systems Division to whom it reported were pitted against the National Range Divi- sion. In 1964 the issue was settled, and the network remained independent of the new organization. Arnold also does a commendable job of explaining the vital technologies of the AFSCF, enabling readers without a technical background to understand them easily. This is particularly true in the case of two important upgrades, the ªrst of which was the Multiple Satellite Augmentation Program. Initiated in 1962, this was designed to permit the network to support operations of two or more satellites over long periods by standardizing station equipment and improving data handling and control. As a result, a truly centralized system was created for the ªrst time from the seven stations. The second upgrade was the Space-Ground Link Subsystem, implemented in the late 1960s. This greatly improved the communications between the ground controllers and spacecraft and also eased the task of handling more than one satellite. The book does a less thorough job in describing the other Department of De- fense satellite command-and-control systems, with the exception of that of the De- fense Meteorological Satellite Program. In this particular case, the AFSCF serviced the early weather satellites before the network’s technical limitations working with multiple satellites and excessive charges by Lockheed for continued AFSCF support led the Air Force (with NRO approval) to construct an independent system. Arnold mentions the separate command-and-control network for the Missile Defense Alarm System satellites but gives no details about it. He provides no discussion at all of the system that supported the Navy’s GRAB electronic intelligence satellite, of which ªve were launched in 1960–1962. The Navy apparently constructed and operated this network because the NRO did not assume responsibility for space-based signals intelligence programs until 1962. Despite these omissions, Spying from Space is an important contribution to Cold War scholarship, and its readers will not be disappointed.

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Leopoldo Nuti, La sªda nucleare: La politica estera italiana e le armi atomiche 1945– 1991. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007. 425 pp.

Reviewed by Matthew Evangelista, Cornell University

In March 1958, General Lauris Norstad, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), sent General Nino Pasti, Italy’s representative to the Atlantic Council, on a mission to Rome. Pasti was to convey to Italy’s defense minister documents concerning the possible deployment of new inter- mediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), known as Jupiters, on Italian soil. As Leopoldo Nuti describes in this impressively researched study of Italy’s policy toward

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nuclear weapons, the deployment was supposed to proceed “as quietly as possible” (p. 175). Some two decades later, retired General Pasti, now a member of the Italian Senate, became an outspoken critic of NATO’s decision to deploy a new generation of “Euromissiles,” the Pershing II IRBMs and cruise missiles. Some of the latter were destined for the Comiso base in Sicily. Although Nuti, a professor of the history of international relations at the University of Rome, mentions Pasti only in his ªrst incarnation as a NATO ofªcial, the story he tells of Italy’s approach to nuclear weapons follows Pasti’s trajectory. Decisions on nuclear weapons shifted from a highly secretive domain, dominated by government ofªcials from the center-right Christian Demo- cratic Party and its allies, to one that involved widespread public debate—in parliament and in the piazza—and included representatives from across the political spec- trum. (Pasti represented the independent left, although his views on disarmament were often close to those of the Soviet Union.) Nuti has undertaken prodigious research, drawing on extensive primary materials from Italy, the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, and logging many hours in numerous archives throughout Europe and North America. His detailed account of relations between Italy and its NATO allies is unlikely to be surpassed. He provides valuable background information on the postwar status of Italy as it sought to revive its international standing following defeat and occupation. One element of this was the question of nuclear weapons. Italy played a prominent role in the development of nuclear physics, but its own physicists—the ones who had not ºed the country in the wake of the fascist regime’s anti-Jewish laws—avoided military-related research. Thus early postwar Italian nuclear policy was dominated by military ofªcials and politicians with little understanding of the meaning of the nuclear revolution. On the one hand, the invention of nuclear weapons seemed to reinforce the views of Giulio Douhet, the Italian theorist of air power in the 1920s, who predicted that the threat of mass aerial bombardment of civilian population centers would provide a de- terrent to war (pp. 30–31). On the other, military planners gave serious attention to using nuclear weapons, including weapons vastly more powerful than the bombs that ºattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to destroy Alpine passes in the unlikely event of a Soviet invasion through Austria or Yugoslavia (pp. 83–84). It is not surprising, then, that the civilian head of the National Committee for Nuclear Research accused military commanders of “absolute incompetence” in the nuclear sphere and recom- mended that they consult with scientists (pp. 90–91). In the 1950s the United States introduced into Italy and other European countries so-called tactical nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed air defense systems (Nike- Hercules), which, if used in war, would have destroyed what they were supposed to defend. Italian politicians were not so much concerned about that prospect. In Nuti’s account, they saw Italy’s embrace of nuclear weapons as a way to raise the country’s status, sometimes in cooperation but other times in competition with the country’s European allies. Italy’s defense minister worked with his French and West German counterparts in the wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis and perceptions of U.S. unreliability to plan for collaboration among the three countries on “modern” military technol- ogy—primarily missiles and nuclear weapons. Nuti quotes a French summary of a

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meeting at which West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told French Prime Minister Guy Mollet that “we must unite against the Americans” and demand what we want (p. 124); namely, in the words of the Italian defense minister, “all the secrets that the Russians already have” (p. 131). When France decided to develop an independent nuclear arsenal, Italian politicians feared that Italy would be relegated to second-class status in the alliance because it did not possess nuclear weapons of its own. When the United States proposed to deploy the Jupiters in Italy, ofªcials were eager to accept them. Nuti reports the views of Italian leaders that exposing their country to risk of Soviet nuclear attack against the U.S. bases had earned Italy a seat at the table for negotiations on major issues such as the “German question” and the fate of Berlin (p. 197). Was this trade—risk of nuclear destruction for higher diplomatic standing—one that ordinary Italians were willing to make? Here Nuti’s book is mainly silent, but he implies that revealing the thinking of the top leaders to the broader public would have put their plans at some risk. Nuti alludes to a debate in the Italian Senate about the Ju- piter deployment (p. 174) and to a desire on the part of the government to keep the agreement secret for as long as possible (p. 178) and to deploy the systems far away from the predominantly “Red” regions, where Communist opposition would be strongest. Nuti provides little detail on Italy’s highly polarized domestic political scene, and when he does, it normally comes from U.S. documents, such as reports from the ambassador in Rome. This shortcoming becomes more serious in his discussion of Italy’s attitude toward attempts to negotiate a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Italian leaders, being preoccupied with the status they believed nuclear weapons conveyed, were reluctant to give up on the possibility of a nuclear Multilateral Force (MLF) under the joint control of several European countries—Italy and Ger- many included. Their attitude to the treaty verged on the openly hostile. Italy eventually signed the treaty in January 1969, appending twelve reservations, but ratiªcation was delayed until 1975. In this case, as in others, Nuti’s emphasis on diplomatic documents and the foreign-policy implications of Italian nuclear policy leads him to neglect an important internal dimension of the story. He hints, for example, at the role of Ugo La Malfa and the centrist Italian Republican Party, and he mentions an anonymous article en- dorsing the treaty in the party’s newspaper. But he does not say why La Malfa felt so strongly about the NPT that he threatened in October 1967 to bring down the government if it did not ease its opposition (p. 329). Later Nuti refers to the intervention of 142 Italian scientists, “led by Edoardo Amaldi, Guido [sic: Francesco] Calogero, and Carlo Schaerf,” who wrote an open letter to the Foreign Ministry demanding that it allow ratiªcation to go forward (p. 341). Calogero, son of the philosopher Guido Calogero, was a prominent nuclear physicist who later became Secretary General of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and International Affairs and accepted the No- bel Peace Prize on behalf of the organization in 1995. He also happened to be La Malfa’s son-in-law. An interesting story is waiting to be uncovered here—about the role of civil society and personal connections in inºuencing government policy. Both Calogero and Schaerf are still alive and actively working on issues related to nuclear

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disarmament. They would have been well worth interviewing to get a fuller picture of the sources of Italian nuclear weapons policy. In the book’s ªnal chapter on NATO’s 1979 Euromissile decision and in the epilogue, Nuti brings in many of the elements missing from his earlier cases—particularly domestic politics. He describes the role of popular opinion and peace activists, mentions the scientists, and explains the difªcult position of the Italian Communist Party in its reluctance to criticize NATO and appear to undermine its suitability to en- ter into the government. Ultimately the story emerges of a major transformation in Italian nuclear policy: from a country in which elites held an “atomic monopoly” and treated weapons of mass destruction as status symbols to one in which popular anti- nuclear sentiments were so pervasive that Italians voted in effect to shut down the entire civilian nuclear energy program in the wake of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. In conveying this transformation, La sªda nucleare makes an indispensable contribution to the history of nuclear weapons and transatlantic relations.

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Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 464 pp.

Reviewed by Martin Ceadel, New College, University of Oxford

This is a magniªcent book—intelligent, informative, lucid, and witty. It surveys a critical half-century of British imperial withdrawal on the basis both of deep knowledge of Colonial Ofªce and other government records and of long thought about the idiosyncrasies of the colonization and decolonization processes. The book shows, among many other things, how white settlers were introduced into East Africa to make the Uganda railway pay, how Kwame Nkrumah advanced independence for the Gold Coast (as Ghana) by helping to save the cocoa industry from the cacao swollen- shoot virus, and how Malcolm MacDonald’s expert conciliation of the United Malays National Organization (the Malay nationalist party) was linked to his intense appreci- ation of Malay female beauty. Ronald Hyam does not pull his punches, describing Ernest Bevin’s 1948 proposal of an all-embracing Western Union as a “noble, crazy, cosmoplastically hallucinatory scheme” (p. 137) and noting that Winston Churchill’s biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, “has little interest in the world outside Europe (deªned—as by the Eurovision Song Contest—to include Israel)” (p. 169n). Hyam emphasizes personal agency, and his capsule portraits of key ªgures are sharply memorable: A. V. Alexander, Clement Attlee’s defence minister, was “a supporter of Chelsea F.C. and a wizard at billiards” (p. 107); Alan Lennox-Boyd, Macmillan’s ªrst colonial secretary, “had a vigorous, masterful manner, which stood him in good stead in his dealings with all kinds of people, from colonial governors to rent boys” (p. 175); and the white prime minister of the Central African Federation, Sir Roy Welensky, “was less well educated than his Af- rican opponents; if he had been an African, his educational attainments would not

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have been sufªcient to allow him to vote” (p. 365). Hyams offers four cricketing met- aphors for Britain’s imperial retreat. He decides that it was neither “bowled out (by nationalists and freedom ªghters),” nor “run out (by imperial overstretch and economic constraints),” nor “retired hurt (because of a collapse of morale and ‘failure of will’).” Instead, Britain was “booed off the ªeld (by international criticism and especially United Nations clamour)” (p. xiii). Ultimately Britain preferred to resist Communism and avoid a third world war than to retain an empire and so undertook a generally successful withdrawal.

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Michael Alexander, Managing the Cold War: A View from the Frontline. London: Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, 2005. 267 pp. £20.

Reviewed by Dianne Kirby, University of Ulster

Sir Michael Alexander’s premature death in June 2002 brought to an end a distin- guished career. He served as an adviser on foreign affairs to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1981, ambassador to Vienna from 1982 to 1986, and ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 1986 to 1992. He was the chairman of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) at the time of his death and left behind a manuscript about his career in the Diplomatic Service. The posthu- mously published book, Managing the Cold War: A View from the Frontline, blends rigorous analysis, personal reminiscence, and detailed accounts of negotiations and policy discussions, plus original documents. The book includes a series of interesting letters written in the 1980s to Prime Minister Thatcher, and it provides critical insights into the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of the behind-the-scenes negotiations crucial to the conduct of international affairs. The expenditure of effort and the achievements of these sorts of talks, conducted beyond the public gaze, are often overlooked because the historical record tends to focus on the main actors at the front of the world stage. It is only natural that those not in the spotlight should want some recognition when their endeavors have secured outcomes for which others, perhaps in their eyes less worthy, receive the applause. However, no matter the motives, seeking a place in history entails risks. Even when career diplomats try to present their experiences and insights as a contribution to the historical record and as a means to avoid future mistakes and even when they show a modicum of deference or respect for their political masters, their accounts remain susceptible to the charge of being “kiss and tell” or ego driven. The adverse responses to the published memoirs of Christopher Meyer, DC Conªdential: The Con- troversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambassador to the U.S. at the Time of 9/11 and the Iraq War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005) well illustrate the risks confronting civil servants who want to make their voices heard in the public domain. Meyer’s de- fenders insisted that his memoirs were in the public interest; whereas his detractors contended that he had broken a professional contract. One irate critic—Brendan

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O’Neill in “Christopher Meyer: What a Creep,” Spiked Politics, 18 November 2005— referred to Meyer as “the political equivalent of those blonde girls who fuck footballers and then tell all to the tabloids.” Meyer, of course, contravened the diplomatic code prohibiting high-ranking ofªcials from revealing conªdential material about controversial current affairs while their erstwhile political masters are still in power. The code, or perhaps rule is the correct term, remains strong, as Sir Jeremy Greenstock discovered when he was refused permission by the Foreign Ofªce to publish a memoir of his time at the United Na- tions. Although Meyer can be charged with disloyalty, with betraying the trust and conªdence required of career diplomats, the fact remains that his contribution and others of its ilk are essential for the fullest possible picture of the jigsaw that is history, even if they are “chattily indiscreet.” Although the latter description does not apply to the elegantly written and carefully worded recollections of Sir Michael Alexander, he shares with Meyer the same failure to abide by the eternal anonymity preferred by those who head the United Kingdom’s diplomatic corps. He also shares with Meyer a favorable view of the British diplomatic service and a much less favorable one of politicians, including the respective prime ministers they served. Interestingly, it is precisely because Alexander was a loyal servant and an admirer of Margaret Thatcher that his portrayal of the “Iron Lady” exposes her weaknesses far more effectively than do any of her many critics. Alexander provides signiªcant and insightful assessments into a range of crucial issues and events during a crucial period in the Cold War. As well as lessons about Cold War diplomacy and the nature of superpower rivalry, he reveals the cold reality of the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain. In addition to being of intrinsic interest to scholars in the ªeld, this is a book from which the discern- ing reader can draw many valuable lessons applicable to the current state of international relations. This is particularly true about the role Britain has played in support of U.S policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Alexander’s values and attitudes, his perceptions and opinions, reveal a great deal about the thinking of the Foreign Ofªce and the tensions that can permeate its relations with the elected government and political appointees. What he has to say about Britain’s place in the world and its relationship with the United States both deserves and needs to be heard. RUSI should be commended for bringing Sir Michael’s incisive observations into the public domain. The misspelling of Khrushchev and the failure to provide either a bibliography or an index is far less commendable. In the ªnal analysis, however, this is a useful book for all those interested in, as well as teaching or studying, history, international affairs, politics, and governance.

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David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 277 pp. $30.00 hardcover; $20.00 paperback.

Reviewed by Whitney Strub, Temple University

Two declarations by U.S. government ofªcials captivated the public in February 1950. The ªrst, Joseph McCarthy’s infamous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech regarding Communist inªltration in the U.S. State Department, served as a catalyst for widespread political repression and has never been forgotten. The other has entirely es- caped public memory: Deputy Under Secretary of State John Peurifoy informed a congressional committee that his department had purged itself of numerous security risks, including 91 homosexuals. A moral panic ensued, during which gay men and lesbians, perceived as security risks because of their alleged susceptibility to Commu- nist blackmail, were expelled by the thousands from the federal government over several decades. In The Lavender Scare, David Johnson examines the roots and consequences of Peurifoy’s revelation, persuasively arguing that it ultimately carried a longer-lasting impact than the brief ºare of McCarthyism and that historians have failed to take sufªcient note of the scare not because it disappeared, but because its institutionaliza- tion into the bureaucracy of the national security state normalized it to the point of invisibility. The intersection of Cold War history and the history of sexuality has proven fertile ground for historians, and Johnson’s contribution to the ªeld is a valuable one that will be appreciated by scholars of disparate interests. Another reason for the invisibility of the Lavender Scare, Johnson argues, is that historians have subsumed it under McCarthyism, writing it off as a relatively insigniªcant corollary. The Wisconsin senator frequently peppered his speeches with jibes at “Communists and queers,” but, as Johnson shows, McCarthy himself took a minor role in the Lavender Scare, which acquired a life of its own. Although the scare served similar conservative ends and operated within an overlapping discursive matrix, it was separate from McCarthyism. Beginning with State Department purges in 1947, it exploded into the public consciousness with Peurifoy’s revelation in 1950, strategi- cally elicited by Republican senators eager to discredit the Truman administration. The ploy worked. As Johnson notes, the public in 1950 displayed more concern with gay civil servants than with Communist ones, and conservatives maximized their ex- ploitation of the moral panic, deploying pointed tropes of the “Fairy Deal” and Dean Acheson’s “Homintern” and more subtly inviting speculation about liberal leaders such as Adlai Stevenson through coded language. Indeed, the phrase “security risk” itself became nearly (and implicitly) synonymous with “homosexual.” With the advent of the Eisenhower administration and Executive Order 10450 in 1953 came the ofªcial barring of gays and lesbians from federal employment, a situation that per- sisted until 1975 and whose legacy lives on today. Johnson masterfully dissects the mechanics of the Lavender Scare. He carefully shows how facts were suppressed and fabricated to perpetuate the scare, offering spe-

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ciªc examples rather than assuming his audience necessarily sees the inherent hypoc- risy of this manufactured homophobia. The methods used by a District of Columbia vice squad leader to calculate the number of homosexuals in Washington, DC, would be laughable if their consequences were not so tragic. The oft-repeated claim that gay employees were open to Communist blackmail had no basis in fact, and Johnson shows how the one historical precedent cited by proponents of the scare, the World War I–era case of Austrian Colonel Alfred Redl, was deliberately misconstrued and distorted. Even internal government documents reveal the spurious basis of the scare. Within the State Department the logic of homosexual purges was framed as one of morale rather than national security, and a 1957 Navy report admitted the lack of evidence for categorizing gay men and lesbians as security risks. The report was con- cealed until 1976. Nonetheless, the Lavender Scare carried tangible consequences, not just in the individual lives of those persecuted but also in the conceptualization of the federal government. Paralleling the conservative Red Scare image of New Deal welfare programs as socialistic, the Lavender Scare helped frame the bureaucratic “Fairy Deal” as a step away from the traditional masculine self-reliance of American mythology, thus queering the entire liberal project in the eyes of many citizens. This conºation both exploited and reinforced the gender norms of the period. In dealing with these abstract issues of policy, Johnson does not ignore the human consequences of institutionalized homophobia. A chapter details the growth of Washington, DC, into one of America’s foremost queer communities in the 1940s as an expanding federal bureaucracy full of clerical work attractive to gay men, combined with the relaxation of social mores normal to wartime, led to a large and visible queer community. Even Lafayette Park, adjacent to the White House, served as a sprightly cruising ground. Johnson shows his impressive range as an historian here, delivering a social history of Washington’s gay subculture comparable in detail to monograph- length community studies by George Chauncey, Marc Stein, and Gary Atkins. Like- wise, a chapter on the effects of the Lavender Scare offers much detail on the depres- sion, alienation, unemployment, underemployment, and even suicide of those affected by it. Although the government’s purges disproportionately affected gay men, Johnson includes vivid stories of lesbians whose lives were shattered by the scare. One unfortunate woman recovered from losing her government job by winning a Ful- bright Fellowship, only to see the State Department spitefully veto her award. Ironically, the Lavender Scare invited its own demise by fostering class consciousness and politicization among many gay men and lesbians. Frank Kameny, an astrono- mer with a Harvard doctorate ªred on account of his sexuality in 1957, led the activist charge, and by 1965 gay-rights activists had begun picketing the White House. John- son makes an important contribution here to queer history, ªlling in the gap between the Mattachine Society’s “retreat to respectability” in the 1950s described by John D’Emilio and the more familiar post-Stonewall efforts. Kameny and the Mattachine Society of Washington occupied a crucial role in the formation of the gay liberation movement, becoming the public image of the “homosexual citizen.” One of the great- est strengths of this very strong book is Johnson’s recounting of the slow but rewarding

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legal battle against government homophobia. Just as the Lavender Scare has been ob- scured by McCarthyism, this legal battle has been buried in the shadow of the Stone- wall uprising. The landmark 1969 U.S. Court of Appeals Norton case challenged “im- morality” as a legitimate category for removal from civil service, but because it was handed down the same week that the Stonewall patrons launched their rebellion, and because it took six years to reach ofªcial implementation, the decision has remained overlooked. Johnson recovers it and its precedents here with admirable clarity. The Lavender Scare is not without minor ºaws. Robert Dean’s Imperial Brother- hood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Policy (Amherst: University of Massachu- setts Press, 2001) contains a rare but substantive discussion of the Lavender Scare, and Johnson seems determined to keep overlap between the books minimal, which leaves him without a persuasive rationale for McCarthy’s lack of involvement. (Dean shows how public suggestions of McCarthy’s own possible homosexuality acted as a deter- rent for the senator.) Also, Johnson’s emphasis on the partisan nature of the Lavender Scare suggests an overdetermined continuity between the 1950s incarnation of the Republican Party and its contemporary anti-gay bigotry and artiªcial moral panics. Although Johnson rightly singles out Republican leaders such as Senators Styles Bridges and Kenneth Wherry as leaders in devising the Lavender Scare, the evidence presented in the book shows the willing and active—even “avid,” in Johnson’s own words (117)—participation of numerous Democrats in the panic. It was the Truman- era State Department’s 1947 decision to begin purging itself of homosexuals, after all, that Bridges was able to exploit in forcing Peurifoy’s 1950 revelation. Still, such ºaws pale in the face of Johnson’s achievement. His expansive research, involving newly unveiled legislative records, privately held papers, and oral histories, is matched by his nuanced, informative, and even moving narrative and analysis. Histo- rians of the Cold War’s domestic front cannot ignore this fresh exploration of an underexplored facet, and scholars studying the role of sexual orientation in society will also appreciate a superior addition to the ªeld’s growing canon.

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Stephen Wagg and David L. Andrews, eds., East Plays West: Sport and the Cold War. London: Routledge, 2007. 338 pp.

Reviewed by John A. Soares, Jr., University of Notre Dame

The editors of this volume argue that sport during the Cold War was a form of culture that served as “an abundant and emotive landscape upon which claims for moral and ideological superiority were aggressively advanced” (p. 3). The book is an ambitious attempt to improve readers’ understanding of this aspect of the Cold War, with seven- teen chapters exploring speciªc events such as the 1956 Soviet-Hungary water polo match and the 1972 Canada-USSR hockey “summit series,” as well as issues such as national identity, race, gender concerns, and performance-enhancing drugs. Many of the essays are interesting and thought-provoking. The best, including Jennifer Parks’s

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chapter about Soviet entry into the Olympic movement, Evelyn Mertin’s chapter on ofªcial Soviet pronouncements about the Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984, and James Riordan’s discussion of post-Soviet sport in Russia, impressively bring to sport the international, multilingual approach that has characterized much Cold War scholarship over the last ªfteen years. Perhaps unintentionally, the collection highlights the disconnect between the purported importance of sport in establishing “moral and ideological superiority” and how little the Western democracies actually did to compete in this ªeld. Mary G. Mc- Donald writes about perceptions that the hockey “miracle” at Lake Placid in 1980 showed American superiority, but this invites the obvious rejoinder: what about all the Soviet victories before and after that? The USSR’s dominance of ice hockey competitions with the United States is only partly conveyed by statistics: Soviet teams won 26 of the 27 Olympic and world tournament games with the United States from 1961 to 1991, and most of those were lopsided routs. Why did anybody think a single victory trumped all of that? Although ice hockey was an example of overwhelming Soviet dominance, the USSR was the unofªcial “winner” of almost all Olympics in which it participated. Given the purported stakes of these sports competitions in the East-West context, Western governmental support for sport was laughable. Jeffrey Montez de Oca’s chapter about American fears of a “muscle gap” (p. 123) offers some explanation for this, pointing out that Americans wanted to beat the Soviet Union without mim- icking the state-driven model that clashed with American notions of freedom. This ideological concern led to a wide disparity between Western and Commu- nist efforts. The Soviet program was state-directed, lavished scarce resources on its elite athletes, had top scientists ªguring out how to use performance-enhancing drugs without detection, and enlisted the army and state security organs to provide substantial and varied support for the sports program. The United States responded to this massive Soviet effort with feeble programs like the President’s Council on Physical Fit- ness. Washington might have spent more time bragging about how competitive its athletes were despite the minuscule government effort devoted to the endeavor. Although this volume is a welcome addition to the growing ªeld of sport and the Cold War, it is not as illuminating as it might be. In part this is because many contributors are determined to counter unreºective Western triumphalism. This can be useful but sometimes induces contributors to downplay some of the uglier aspects of Communism. For example, one essay denounces the “imperial presence” of the United States in Afghanistan after September 2001 at the same time that another con- tributor excuses the Soviet Union’s “defensive action” there in the 1980s. Terms like “totalitarian,” “closed society,” and even “communist” appear in quotation marks when describing Communist countries, but “totalitarian” appears without quotation marks to describe South Korea (!). In a more substantive example, Paul Dimeo’s chapter convincingly argues that ideology, not science, drove Western opposition to ste- roids and that Western athletes were dirtier than many Westerners suppose, but it tries too hard to draw equivalence between a system that does not adequately police cheat- ing and one that deliberately and massively promotes it. Not only do efforts at a counternarrative cause authors to downplay problems in Communist regimes, a num-

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ber of these contributions do not cite sources in the relevant languages, falling short of prevailing standards in Cold War international scholarship and encouraging skeptics to dismiss their contributions. The volume also suffers because some contributors appear shaky on history and politics. For example, the comment about the Soviet Union’s “defensive” invasion of Afghanistan could have sounded convincing rather than polemical had it discussed the Carter administration’s preinvasion support for the Afghan resistance, Islamic fun- damentalism’s growing appeal in the wake of the Iranian revolution, and Moscow’s worries that Islamic radicalism would penetrate into Soviet Central Asia. Essays dealing with the 1970s and 1980 give short shrift both to détente and to the events that caused its collapse. The author who makes multiple references to George “Keenan” as author of the “Long Telegram” (p. 137) will not inspire conªdence in serious Cold War scholars, nor will the chapter that refers to American troops being “at war in Cambodia” in 1980 (p. 299). The chapter that refers to “an alleged loss of American self-conªdence” in 1980 (p. 224) overlooks the cumulative impact of Vietnam, Wa- tergate, stagºation, oil crises, the string of Communist gains in the Third World from 1975 to 1979, and polls showing that 84 percent of Americans in 1980 believed that the country was in “deep and serious trouble.” Both articles dealing with Lake Placid incorrectly refer to the U.S.-Soviet medal round game as a “semiªnal” (pp. 222, 297)—a minor quibble, to be sure, but a detail experts in sports studies should get right. These and other problems raise doubts about the reliability of some of the essays and about the soundness of the editors’ oversight. Still, in the emerging ªeld of scholarship on Cold War sport, this volume covers an array of subjects sure to be of interest to scholars in the ªeld and guaranteed to ig- nite debate. One hopes that other scholars will join in.

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Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xii ϩ 358 pp.

Reviewed by Timothy J. Lomperis, Saint Louis University

The literature on the Vietnam War has become so voluminous that it is becoming re- petitive. Works that offer new insights or reveal new information have become rare. Mark Lawrence’s Assuming the Burden, however, is one of those rare exceptions. His book offers a unique perspective, one that reverberates with implications for many other parts of this American tragedy. It is an important book. Setting out to examine the origins of the French Indochina War, Lawrence provides a detailed scholarly analysis of the period from 1947 to 1950 in which the French successfully pulled the United States into supporting them. As Lawrence points out, it was a hard sell, and it required enlisting the support of the British, who had their own reservations about playing such a role. In contemporary parlance, it was

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a “long, hard slog.” Lawrence adds to the complexity of the French campaign by tracing the political divisions that emerged over the issue in all three countries. The difªculty in getting the United States to intervene stemmed from a conºict of images. At least initially, a strong core of opinion on the American side saw the emerging decolonizing world as a struggle for modern nationalism and democracy in which the formal colonial powers could help most by simply leaving. The French, in their determination to return to their colonies, sought to deºect Americans from this image toward one that showed a French return as part of the emerging titanic global struggle against Communism. Lawrence shows that both the British and the Ameri- cans resisted this French image for a long time. The British did not accept it because of misgivings that stemmed from their own intervention in Vietnam in 1945–1946 to “supervise” the surrender of the Japanese. They became involved in the negotiations between the French and the Vietnamese nationalists/Communists, and they were not sanguine about the chances for a French return that could assuage the rising nationalist aspirations they had witnessed. Nonetheless, the march of global events began to favor the French image. The British, in their own withdrawal from India, faced rising Communist insurgencies ªrst in Burma and then in full force in Malaya, and the Communist afªliations of Ho Chi Minh made the French image more potent than championing rising nationalist aspirations in former colonies. For the Americans, the ascendancy of Mao Zedong in the civil war in China also made stopping Communism an ascendant priority over promoting nationalism. To win over the British ªrst as a means to enlist American support, the French loudly promoted the cause of Bao Dai as a nationalist alternative to Ho Chi Minh. Despite strong American and British urgings, the French never turned over real sovereignty to Bao Dai, and thus neither the British nor the Americans proved cooperative in playing along with this charade. Stanley Karnow even reported Bao Dai as telling a Western journalist that he (Bao Dai)—not the prostitute draped around his shoul- ders—was the real whore in Indochina. France’s “success,” as Lawrence meticulously recounts, came in May 1950, when the Americans, alarmed by the march of events that suggested a Communist jugger- naut in Asia, professed their support for Bao Dai as a genuine nationalist alternative to Ho Chi Minh and opened the ºoodgates to military assistance to France. This assistance eventually came to assume 80 percent of the French war costs. In spire of this “success,” the French went down to ultimate defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. This brief summary cannot do full justice to Lawrence’s tightly argued scholarly account based on extensive primary research. He does not overreach himself in his in- terpretations or analysis and is even-handed in handling the evidence. The book’s implications extend considerably beyond the 1947–1950 period. In revealing the tortuous path of America’s ªrst “indirect” intervention in Indochina, readers also see how at least the beginnings of the Cold War were multipolar in their interactions. That is, the origins of the Indochina conºict really arose out of diplomatic wrangling among the British, French, and Americans on one side and among the Viet Minh, Chinese, and Soviet Union on the other. Not until the 1960s did

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global politics come closer to being a bipolar standoff between Washington and Mos- cow. The book also highlights the tragic origins of America’s involvement in this on- going struggle in Indo-China. The United States, in letting itself be pulled into France’s vainglorious attempt to reestablish its empire, was trapped into picking up the pieces and continuing the struggle after the French defeat. Readers are apt to ªnd it galling that the French (President Charles de Gaulle, in particular) and the British ªrst successfully conned the United States into this misbegotten war and then became harsh critics of the American effort. Despite the book’s considerable strengths, it has its limitations. In the conclu- sion, when Lawrence goes beyond the bounds of his narrative, he overreaches with more casual scholarship in some of his assertions of follow-on effects. He asserts, for example, that John F. Kennedy would have surely de-escalated the American war in Vietnam if he had been elected to a second term. This remains a highly contentious point in the literature. Lawrence’s discussion about Dien Bien Phu fails to mention the extensive Chinese involvement in that ªnal battle. In fact, in his focus on British and American intervention, his narrative fails to acknowledge how international the “French war” had become with the substantial Chinese assistance that came both in 1950 and especially in 1953 after the end of the Korean War. The book is not always easy to read. The paragraphs and chapters are long, and the account itself goes back and forth over the same material so that, despite the tight three-year period of Lawrence’s account, readers can become confused about where they are in the story. All said, however, Assuming the Burden is an important addition to the large body of scholarship on the Vietnam War. Lawrence presents an important perspective in the narrative itself. But this is also a narrative that carries broad implications for an understanding of the larger war awaiting the Americans a decade later. I salute Mark Lawrence for this contribution.

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David C. Wills, The First War on Terrorism: Counter-Terrorism Policy during the Reagan Administration. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleªeld, 2003. 285 pp. $27.95.

Reviewed by Robert Kaufman, Pepperdine University

Al-Qaeda’s devastating attack on 11 September 2001 led to a new War on Terror as a dominant part of American foreign policy. Systematic studies of America’s previous battles with terrorists are therefore timely and important. Such studies can yield compelling guidance for distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate strategies. Osama Bin Laden and other enemies of the United States have cited the inadequacy of previous American responses as having fueled their contempt for American resolve in the current war. David Wills’s The First War on Terrorism provides a ºawed but valu-

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able account of the Reagan administration’s response to political terrorism in the 1980s. Wills’s great strengths lie in the realms of research and narrative rather than policy and analysis. One of his serious errors is projecting the priorities of the post-9/11 world onto the decade of the 1980s. The problem of terrorism had less salience for the Reagan administration than for President George W. Bush. The issue was important for Ronald Reagan but was secondary to the Soviet threat that he rightly believed was primary. Much of what Wills deems inconsistency makes more sense when viewed through the prism of the administration’s paramount objective of waging the Cold War. Not only Reagan but every Cold War president found daunting the task of forg- ing an anti-Soviet consensus in a region seething with animosity, crosscutting cleav- ages, tyranny, and deªance to American conceptions of freedom. Another serious error, related to the ªrst, is Wills’s underestimation of Reagan himself. Wills sticks to the old depiction of Reagan as an uninformed, disengaged president, even though recent scholarship has thoroughly undermined that depiction. Contrary to what Wills claims, Reagan came to ofªce with long-standing, well- formulated views about foreign policy—views that served as the basis for his highly successful strategy for waging the Cold War during the 1980s. The archives and even Wills’s own cases studies establish that Reagan was the driving force of his administration’s major policies, especially with regard to the Soviet Union. Nor does Wills seem to realize that William Clark, Reagan’s national security adviser from 1982 to 1983, was the person whom Reagan trusted and relied on the most. Finally, Wills accepts at face value, throughout the book, the discredited notion that Yasir Arafat truly was committed to a genuine two-state solution of the Palestin- ian conºict that would also protect Israel’s right to exist within defensible boundaries. This leads to his misguided view that pressuring a democratic ally like Israel rather than reforming a corrupt and authoritarian Palestinian government (now com- pounded by the rise of Hamas terrorists) would address the root cause of Palestinian terror. What largely redeems these shortcomings is the meticulousness and thorough- ness of the case studies themselves. Wills provides deªnitive accounts of the Reagan administration’s debacle in Lebanon in 1983–1984, the hijacking of TWA ºight 847 in June 1985, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in October 1985, the Rome and Vi- enna airport massacres in December 1985, and the bombing of the LA Belle Disco in April 1986. He splendidly conveys the interplay of differences and circumstances that often inhibited a decisive response: the difªculty of identifying perpetrators beyond a reasonable doubt; fear of domestic reaction and aversion to inºicting casualties on in- nocent civilians; and policy differences among the president’s major advisers, particularly Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. These cases studies are essential reading for anyone trying to comprehend the debate over the Bush administration’s strategy for waging the war on terror. Among other things, we learn that George W. Bush was not the ªrst to contemplate regime change as remedy to the root cause of terrorism. Prominent members of the Reagan administration weighed the possibility of overthrowing Muammar Gadhaª in Libya

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before concluding that the difªculties of doing so were prohibitive. Secretary of State Shultz emerges not only as the Reagan administration’s strongest advocate of a forceful response to terrorism but also as the godfather of the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East. The arguments in 2003 of Secretary of State Colin Powell and others within the Bush administration who were skeptical of invading Iraq echo the rationale that Secre- tary of Defense Weinberger routinely invoked in his consistent opposition to Schultz’s more forceful, preemptive approach. Above all, the case studies demonstrate that Reagan himself was primarily re- sponsible for the inconsistencies of his administration’s policies. This is not because he was disengaged but because he was profoundly and uncharacteristically ambivalent. On the one hand, Reagan’s vow to take an unrelentingly ªrm line against terrorism reºected the deep convictions that largely informed his policies toward the Soviet Union. On the other hand, he was, by his own admission, always a soft touch on issues involving appeals to his concern about civilian casualties. This is the main reason that Reagan’s record on terrorism does not square with the decisiveness of his stance in the ªnal phases of the Cold War against an enemy about whom he had no ambiva- lence. The great lesson of this book is the importance of presidential leadership in waging the war on terror. There is no substitute for a president having a clear, consistent, and correct vision of the threat and how to combat it.

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