How Presidents Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965 by John P. Burke; Fred I.GreensteinReview by: Gaddis SmithForeign Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 174-175Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20044337 .

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174 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The admirably long and broad view of key issues of the world economy,

plus the experience and sophistication of the authors, make most of these

papers eminently worth reading.

The United States

Gaddis Smith

THE REAGAN PARADOX: U.S. FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1980s. By Coral Bell. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1990, 182 pp. $30.00 (paper, $11.95).

For three decades Coral Bell, perspicacious Australian analyst, has been

writing pithy studies of American foreign policy. Here she elaborates on

the many gaps between the ideological, bellicose declaratory policies of the

Reagan years and the pragmatic, cautious operational policy. In almost

every sector the results of the Reagan foreign policy by 1988 were at odds with the words of the early years of the administration. Future historians will have to tackle the question of how much this was a matter of deliberate

personal decisions on the part of Reagan.

RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON: THE RISE OF AN AMERICAN POLI TICIAN. By Roger Morris. New York: Henry Holt, 1989, 1005 pp. $29.95.

Roger Morris has written a first-rate biography of Richard Nixon up to

the election of 1952 when he became vice president. The book is especially strong on the politics of California during Nixon's apprenticeship, and in

analyzing Nixon as the product of time and place.

LOST VICTORY: A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF AMERICA'S SIX TEEN-YEAR INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM. By William Colby, with

James McCargar. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989, 391 pp. $22.95. Much of the author's distinguished career in the CIA involved

Vietnam?both as an officer in the field and high official in Washington. In this passionate memoir he argues that a stable noncommunist South

Vietnam could have been established had not the United States toppled President Ngo Dinh Diem, if more sustained effort had been devoted to

providing security for the villagers, and if the United States had been able to follow through on the defeat of the Vietcong's Tet Offensive in 1968.

Maybe?maybe not.

HOW PRESIDENTS TEST REALITY: DECISIONS ON VIETNAM, 1954 AND 1965. By John P. Burke and Fred I. Greenstein. New York:

Russell Sage Foundation, 1989, 339 pp. $29.95. Two political scientists, drawing on once-secret documentation, recon

struct, compare and analyze how President Eisenhower decided in 1954 not to commit American forces to Vietnam, and how President Johnson decided the contrary in 1965. While cautioning against too theoretical an

approach to presidential decision-making, they see positive lessons in

Eisenhower's structured advisory system and negative ones in Johnson's improvisation. The fact that the authors see the 1954 decision as sound and the 1965 one as disastrous may shape their conclusions. A stimulating book.

VIETNAM NOW: A CASE FOR NORMALIZING RELATIONS WITH HANOI. By John LeBoutillier. New York: Praeger, 1989, 144 pp. $18.95.

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RECENT BOOKS 175

The author, once a very conservative member of Congress, argues his case for normalization cogently with an eye to bringing the vexatious POW/MIA issue to a satisfactory conclusion. He also believes diplomatic relations with Vietnam will assist "longer term American interests ... in

winning the peaceful battle against Moscow."

POLITICAL INSTABILITY AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY: THE MIDDLE OPTIONS. By John David Orme. New York: St. Martin's, 1989, 219 pp. $45.00 (paper, $16.95).

After demolishing the clich? that the United States has consistently supported repressive right-wing regimes in the Third World, the author

surveys the mixed results of other options followed in dealing with unstable

regimes: reformist intervention, encouragement of liberalization, a nego tiated political solution and conciliation.

ROOSEVELT AND MARSHALL: PARTNERS IN POLITICS AND WAR. By Thomas Parrish. New York: Morrow, 1989, 608 pp. $25.00.

Although specialists in the history of World War II will find no strikingly new insights, this double-focus study of the president and his chief of staff is a fine anecdotal introduction to the political-military course of the war? a tribute to both, but especially to Marshall.

THE BORROWED YEARS, 1938-1941: AMERICA ON THE WAY TO WAR. By Richard M. Ketchum. New York: Random House, 1989, 896 pp. $29.95.

This is an engrossing, beautifully written popular history intertwined with autobiography (the author was a Yale undergraduate at the time). Readers who lived through those years will know that Ketchum has it right.

AFTERMATH OF WAR: AMERICANS AND THE REMAKING OF JAPAN, 1945-1952. By Howard B. Schonberger. Kent (OH): Kent State

University Press, 1989, 347 pp. $26.00 (paper, $16.50). American policy toward occupied Japan was not, as myth would have it,

simply an extension of the mind and personality of General Douglas MacArthur. It was, as this excellent study demonstrates, shaped by an array of people representing conflicting viewpoints and different segments of American society and government. The book's chapters, all deeply re

searched in American sources, deal with MacArthur, Joseph C. Grew, T. A.

Bisson, James S. Killen, Harry F. Kern, William H. Draper, Jr., Joseph M.

Dodge and John Foster Dulles.

FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS IN THE OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES, 1942-1945. By Barry M. Katz.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, 251 pp. $27.50. This lively book is a highly selective study of some of the work of the

Research and Analysis Division of the Office of Strategic Studies in which

many able academics made real contributions to the war effort. Instead of

covering the entire very wide range of R&A activities it concentrates on those of a few: ?migr? Germans (including Marxists and enemy aliens);

German historians in the classical mold and the young Americans they worked with who became leaders of the postwar profession; economists

trying to devise rational methods of choosing bombing targets; Soviet

experts conducting the first true area studies in the United States. One may

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