Volume 38, Number 1 & 2 · January 17, 1991
The Good Old Days
By Alan Brinkley
The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867–1950
by Godfrey Hodgson
Knopf, 402 pp., $24.95
In 1976, Godfrey Hodgson, a British journalist with long experience covering American politics, published America in Our Time, a remarkable study of America's fall from the enormous power and confidence of the 1950s and early 1960s to the disillusionment of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. Among the principal culprits in this tale of failure, Hodgson argued, was the foreign-policy 'establishment,' which had dominated American international relations throughout the postwar era, guiding the country from triumph to disaster.[1] Now, fifteen years later, Hodgson has written a biography of the man who by almost all accounts was the founder and patron saint of the postwar foreign policy establishment: Henry L. Stimson, one of the most widely revered American statesmen of the twentieth century, whose extraordinary public career spanned four decades and six presidencies.
Review, 5586 words
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