Volume 17, Number 3 · September 2, 1971
Did Anyone Start the Cold War?
By Ronald Steel
Condemned to Freedom
by William Pfaff
Random House, 210 pp., $6.95
The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy
by Robert W. Tucker
Johns Hopkins, 136 pp., $2.75 (paper)
Promises to Keep
by Chester Bowles
Harper & Row, 672 pp., $12.95
Architects of Illusion
by Lloyd Gardner
Quadrangle, 365 pp., $8.95
Yalta
by Diane Shaver Clemens
Oxford, 356 pp., $8.50
America and Russia in a Changing World
by W. Averell Harriman
Doubleday, 218 pp., $5.95
From Trust to Terror
by Herbert Feis
Norton, 428 pp., $10.00
The Yalta Myths
by Athan Theoharis
University of Missouri Press, 263 pp., $10.00
The Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938
by Stephen E. Ambrose
Penguin, 343 pp., $1.65 (to be published October 20, 1971) (paper)
Vietnam, as we have learned from the Pentagon papers, was no aberration. It resulted logically from the decisions made and the attitudes assumed throughout the cold war. It was Harry Truman who in 1950 provided aid to the French to put down Ho Chi Minh's independence movement. It was Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles who continued paying for France's colonial war and who threatened to intervene with American troops and atomic weapons. After that war was lost, they installed Ngo Dinh Diem and defied the Geneva accords calling for elections to unify Vietnam. Later it was John F. Kennedy, a true believer in the domino theory, who got rid of Diem when he ceased to be malleable and who dispatched American combat troops to ensure an anti-communist South Vietnam. The expansion of the war by Lyndon Johnson and the current efforts of Richard Nixon to achieve with air power and South Vietnamese mercenaries the victory denied American troops are all outgrowths of the same decisions about communism and America's role in the world.
Review, 6606 words
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