Michael J. Hogan

Excellent book on Truman's presidency and national defense priorities. Among topics of interest to us include a good discussion of inter-service mission and budget rivalries during this period as well as the disagreements surrounding Universal Military Training proposals that were considered by Congress during this period. Also examines the reorganization of the Defense Department, looks at personalities of the men involved and the disagreements that arose between agencies and individuals. Emphasizes how budgetary costs drove though processes of everyone - the presient, Congress, and the services themselves.… (mer)

Nearly 55 years after his assassination, John F. Kennedy stands as the most popular of America's post-World War II presidents. Poll after poll serves as testament to his enduring appeal for millions of Americans, which crosses racial, ideological, and generational lines. How Kennedy came to assume such an indelible place in the American imagination is the subject of Michael Hogan's book, which looks at the development of Kennedy's posthumous image and why it endures decades after his demise.

Kennedy's wife Jacqueline is at the center of Hogan's argument. In the hours following the president's assassination, his grieving widow asserted a leading role in the planning for his funeral, making decisions and choreographing events so as to cement the image of the young, hopeful leader that he and his wife had done so much to cultivate. As Hogan notes, this proved a dramatic success, one witness by the people of the world thanks to the use of television, Jacqueline furthered this effort by exercising close control over the works published immediately after his death (particularly William Manchester's book [b:The Death of a President|1106474|The Death of a President November 1963|William Manchester|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387709372s/1106474.jpg|1502552]) and the memorials constructed in D.C. and in Massachusetts.

Kennedy's circle of family and friends continued even as the nation emerged from their grief and began to reassess the president's legacy. As authors began challenging the sentimental, rose-colored view propagated in early biographies by Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the family pushed back by attempting to dissuade authors who did not offer the Kennedys editorial control from writing their books or restricting their access to JFK's papers. To Hogan, the effort here was not an effort to control history but memory -- the public image of Kennedy held by millions of Americans. This, even as the sordid details of Kennedy's private life gradually leaked out and revisionists challenged the image of Kennedy as a successful president, the public continued to hold him in an esteem which made association with his image a laudable political goal even today.

Hogan's book is an excellent account of the construction of Kennedy's posthumous portrayal by those closest to him and its impact how how he is remembered. In it he recounts the calculations of the people involved, the fighting that took place to realize their goals, and the effect of the result upon the nation's remembrance of the 35th president. Though Hogan's scope leaves out many fictional works which reflect the broader national effort to engage with what Kennedy meant to the country, his book is nonetheless a superb study that helps to explain why Kennedy continues to occupy such a beloved place in our national memory.… (mer)

Hogan demonstrates that cooperative relationships between American multinationals and their British equivalents augmented government to government relations during the post-war decade. In the first half of the decade the Harding administration, through the agency of the federal reserve bank, encouraged American bankers to cooperate with their British counterparts to provide a stable structure of loans to the defeated Austrians and Germans, a structure which would ensure the repayment of wartime loans as well as reparations. Throughout the 1920s American cable, radio, and oil corporations received government sanction and limited assistance in cooperative efforts with their British multinational equivalents. With the onset of the depression in 1929, Anglo-American cooperation collapsed in the wake of a resurgence of statism and economic nationalism" (p. 226).… (mer)

In the volume of essays entitled Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, scholars in the field of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy respond to growing criticism within the academic community that the discipline has become a "marginalized" subguild of the larger and more cosmopolitan guild of Americanists. Contributors to the volume marshal a wide range of approaches to the task of explaining the history of American foreign relations designed to return the disciple to the "cutting edge" of scholarship. Taken together, these essays present the current "state of the art.1I

The editors introduce this collection with a brief but extremely useful historiographical sketch, which traces the discipline from its birth in the inter-war years, through realism and New Left revisionism, and into the brave new world of post-revisionist synthesis. In the book's first section, Robert J. McMahon and Emily S. Rosenberg defend the discipline against two of the most persistent criticisms recently leveled at it, parochialism and the failure to integrate the "new social history" into its narrative. In concluding this first section, Thomas G. Paterson attempts to define the current parameters of the discipline by providing a comprehensive model for explaining the history of American foreign relations which includes a consideration of international, regional, national, and individual factors. This framework provides a way of integrating current research, as his own textbook bare witness.

The collection of essays which follows in the second section of this book is valuable as a means of testing the flexibility of textbook accounts. It is to be expected that these innovative approaches are of varying degrees of utility for a textbook treatment of 20th century American foreign policy and diplomacy, yet flexibility is a hallmark of the good textbook. The first task of any textbook must be to present the most significant information to an understanding of the subject at hand in a manner that allows for comprehension by the non-specialist. In this respect a textbook is conceptually more limited than a monograph.

The ability to integrate the less intricate of these new approaches into the understanding provided by the textbooks cited above is one measure of their quality. These two textbooks bear witness to the fact that textbook writers are limited by the need to present a certain body of accepted facts. Many of the same quotations from historical actors appear in both accounts, the periodization which they use is roughly analogous, and each concentrates on the same major events in the 20th century in developing their narrative. The presentations of American diplomatic and foreign policy history offered by these two accounts diverge primarily in their underlying assumptions about the process of history.… (mer)