Turned to Finding Ways to Reduce Tensions with the Soviet Union
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Book Reviews turned to ªnding ways to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union, using his com- mencement address at American University on 10 June 1963 to speak eloquently about the need for peace and to announce that he and Khrushchev had agreed to ne- gotiate a nuclear test ban treaty. Dallek is not obliged to accept Beschloss’s formulation, but he writes as if it and other such analyses do not exist. Rather than accepting or rejecting Beschloss’s linkage of events, Dallek ignores it. He fails to mention Kennedy’s January 1961 “moment of danger” address at all, and he minimizes the importance of Kennedy’s American Uni- versity speech, saying “it received barely a mention in the press” (p. 261). In reality, the speech was reported as the lead story in the next day’s New York Times, where it was highlighted with a four-column headline and a second interpretive article. Dallek’s failure to look closely at Kennedy and the Cold War is also evident in his inattention to important works on the topic. Examples of writings not listed in his bibliography include such Cold War–era contributions as Desmond Ball’s richly doc- umented Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Admin- istration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and John Lewis Gaddis’s re- view of the declassiªed post–Cold War record, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). In short, An Unªnished Life is a contribution to the understanding of John F. Kennedy, but not to Kennedy and the Cold War. ✣✣✣ Ronald J. Granieri, The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, The CDU/CSU and the West, 1949–1966. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. 256 pp. $69.95. Reviewed by Thomas A. Schwartz, Vanderbilt University Pundits went to great lengths in the summer of 2002 to explain German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s break with the United States over Iraq. Some lamented the end of the postwar U.S.-German alliance and remembered a “golden age” of Atlantic solidar- ity when the Christian Democrats under the venerable Konrad Adenauer led the Fed- eral Republic. Many argued that the new Germany with its center in Berlin and now under the leftwing Social Democrats was simply more inclined to stand against Amer- ican leadership. Ronald Granieri’s Ambivalent Alliance should be required reading for those prone to such quick generalizations about German politics. Granieri has crafted an elegant and sophisticated history of Konrad Adenauer’s leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Volkspartei or people’s party that would dominate West German politics for its ªrst two decades. Granieri argues that the central issue in this early history was not whether West Germany would pursue integration with the West rather than seeking reuniªcation. Konrad Adenauer was basically correct when he argued, in response to Kurt Schumacher’s accusation that Adenauer was the “Chancellor of the Allies,” that if Schumacher were in his shoes he would follow a 171 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2005.7.3.171 by guest on 26 September 2021 Book Reviews similar policy. The real issue, in Granieri’s view, was which “West” would the Federal Republic of Germany seek to join—a continental Western European organization or an Atlantic-oriented grouping led by the United States? Earlier historical works have recognized the existence of a split within the Chris- tian Democrats after Adenauer left power in 1963. The Atlanticists led by Ludwig Erhard, who had been Adenauer’s foreign minister and succeeded him as chancellor, and an earlier Gerhard Schröder (no relation to the current chancellor) squared off against a group of “Gaullists,” among them the Bavarian leader Franz Josef Strauss. However, Granieri’s original contribution is to trace the division back to the origins of the Christian Democrats and to highlight the central role of Konrad Adenauer. In Granieri’s portrayal, Adenauer is a master at the art of political juggling, pragmatically balancing the different ideological, regional, and economic interests that made up the Christian Democrats. As the chief advocate of Westbindung, Adenauer left this policy open to interpretation, at times positing an almost slavish following of the United States and at other times defying American interests in a manner that would make even leftwing Germans wince. Granieri rightly argues that Westbindung, far from be- ing its antithesis, was a form of “national policy that sought through close cooperation with the West the maximum advantage for the Federal Republic” (p. 21). Germany’s deep and sustained commitment to multilateralism, so pronounced in the post–Cold War era, should not obscure the fact that this multilateralism was designed to achieve national objectives, something Timothy Garton Ash notes in his book In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Viking, 1994), which deals with the later era of Ostpolitik. Relying largely on party records and the personal papers of CDU politicians, Granieri tracks the history of the CDU from its narrow victory in the ªrst Bundestag election of 1949 through its rise to a majority in its third campaign in 1957. Persua- sive as Granieri’s text is, the campaign posters he has chosen to illustrate his argument are even better, telling the story of Adenauer’s centrality to his heterogeneous party in the giant image of der Alte that dominated the CDU’s message. The book reaches its stride when it discusses the more difªcult situation in which Adenauer found himself toward the end of the 1950s. The U.S. government at that time was becoming more interested in a possible détente policy with the Soviet Union, and the returning French hero, Charles de Gaulle, offered an alternative source for Adenauer’s alle- giance. In a chapter on the possibility of a Paris-Bonn axis, Granieri makes clear the intense competition between the young U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, and de Gaulle for the allegiance of the West Germans, a competition that threatened to tear the CDU in two. Adenauer sought to please both the Gaullists and the Atlanticists in the CDU until the Kennedy administration’s decision to support the partial nuclear test ban treaty with Moscow led Adenauer himself into the camp of the Gaullists. Granieri does an excellent job of portraying the West German government’s anger at the test ban, an illuminating insight into the isolation of West German politics given the widespread acclaim that the treaty garnered from the rest of the world. Granieri’s ªnal chapter, on the end of the Adenauer era, goes far toward demon- strating the soundness of his emphasis on the centrality of the ªrst West German 172 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2005.7.3.171 by guest on 26 September 2021 Book Reviews leader. After Adenauer stepped down as chancellor, the CDU began to fall apart, pulled by its rival personalities and its different visions of the West. What is fascinat- ing is the degree to which the West German political inªghting was removed from trends in the broader international picture. Franz Josef Strauss and other Gaullists at- tacked Erhard and Foreign Minister Schröder for adopting a “movement” policy aimed at improving West Germany’s relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, an objective that de Gaulle was pursuing even more avidly. The United States was also pressuring Erhard to do more to ease tensions, causing Erhard to fear that the Gaullists would step up their attack against him. The West German internal ªght be- came all-consuming until Erhard was eventually deposed and replaced with a grand coalition of the CDU and the Social Democrats. By this point it seemed that the Christian Democratic factions preferred to govern with their Socialist enemies rather than their erstwhile party comrades. Granieri has produced an exceptionally readable political history of Germany’s largest party, underlining the crucial importance of its ªrst leader, Konrad Adenauer, in guiding the party and maintaining its fragile unity. This book helps explain the ambiguities inherent to the Federal Republic’s policy of Westbindung, ambiguities that remain to the present day. ✣✣✣ Pierre Asselin, A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agree- ment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 272 pp. $45.00. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco, eds., A Companion to the Vietnam War. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. 514 pp. $99.95. Reviewed by Mark Atwood Lawrence, University of Texas at Austin These are fertile times for the study of the Vietnam War. The growing availability of Vietnamese sources permits unprecedented coverage of the war on the “other side.” Meanwhile, culturally oriented scholars are asking new questions of U.S. documen- tary material, highlighting the importance of race, gender, and other aspects of ideol- ogy in understanding America’s war in Vietnam. For their part, traditional diplomatic and political historians of U.S. foreign policy are using newly declassiªed American documents to explore the Nixon administration’s policy in Vietnam and to reevaluate earlier phases of the war. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco’s volume of essays, A Companion to the Vietnam War, offers a helpful overview of all these trends. The book’s twenty-four chapters, mostly extracts or overviews of book-length studies that have appeared in re- cent years, display some of the ªnest recent scholarship dealing with the development of Vietnamese nationalism and especially the course of U.S. policymaking regarding Vietnam from the 1930s through the end of the American war. As the editors promise at the outset, the volume includes well-established scholars as well as rising stars.