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In the late 1950s, Washington was driven by its fear of communist subversion: it saw the hand of Kremlin behind developments at home and across the globe. The FBI was obsessed with the threat posed by American communist party--yet party membership had sunk so low, writes H.W. Brands, that it could have fit "inside a high-school gymnasium," and it was so heavily infiltrated that J. Edgar Hoover actually contemplated using his informers as a voting bloc to take over the party. Abroad, the preoccupation with communism drove the White House to help overthrow democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran, and replace them with dictatorships. But by then the Cold War had long since blinded Americans to the ironies of their battle against communism.
In The Devil We Knew, Brands provides a witty, perceptive history of the American experience of the Cold War, from Truman's creation of the CIA to Ronald Reagan's creation of SDI. Brands has written a number of highly regarded works on America in the twentieth century; here he puts his experience to work in a volume of impeccable scholarship and exceptional verve. He turns a critical eye to the strategic conceptions (and misconceptions) that led a once-isolationist nation to pursue the war against communism to the most remote places on Earth. By the time Eisenhower left office, the United States was fighting communism by backing dictators from Iran to South Vietnam, from Latin America to the Middle East--while engaging in covert operations the world over. Brands offers no apologies for communist behavior, but he deftly illustrates the strained thinking that led Washington to commit gravely disproportionate resources (including tens of thousands of lives in Korea and Vietnam) to questionable causes. He keenly analyzes the changing policies of each administration, from Nixon's juggling (SALT talks with Moscow, new relations with Ccmmunist China, and bombing North Vietnam) to Carter's confusion to Reagan's laserrattling. Equally important is his incisive, often amusing look at how the anti-Soviet struggle was exploited by politicians, industrialists, and government agencies. He weaves in deft sketches of figures like Barry Goldwater and Henry Jackson (who won a Senate seat with the promise, "Many plants will be converting from peace time to all-out defense production"). We see John F. Kennedy deliver an eloquent speech in 1957 defending the rising forces of nationalism in Algeria and Vietnam; we also see him in the White House a few years later, ordering a massive increase in America's troop commitment to Saigon. The book ranges through the economics and psychology of the Cold War, demonstrating how the confrontation created its own constituencies in private industry and public life.
In the end, Americans claimed victory in the Cold War, but Brands's account gives us reason to tone down the celebrations. "Most perversely," he writes, "the call to arms against communism caused American leaders to subvert the principles that constituted their country's best argument against communism." This far-reaching history makes clear that the Cold War was simultaneously far more, and far less, than we ever imagined at the time.

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Library Journal Review

For most Americans, the abrupt end of the Cold War created a feeling of relief mixed with anxiety for the future. By the late 1980s, the U.S.-Soviet relationship had settled into an almost comfortable middle age. We knew them, and they knew us. Both Pessen and Brands devote much of their works to an overview of how the Cold War developed. Pessen, one of our foremost Jacksonian scholars, is harshly critical of American foreign policy during the past 40 years. He argues that the United States consistently misrepresented Soviet intentions, with serious damage to American domestic freedoms. Brands ( Inside the Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 1918-1961 , LJ 4/15/91) is more even-handed in his criticism, believing that American policy-makers were influenced by psychological, strategic, economic, and political factors that came into play at different times throughout the Cold War era. Both books should be considered valuable extended interpretive essays that, separately or together, would be good choices for any library.-- Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In this thought-provoking, controversial study, Brands charges that the responsibility for fomenting the Cold War, and especially for its prolongation, rests heavily on the United States. The Cold War, he argues, was fueled by the endless search for foreign enemies by which Americans need to affirm their identity and basic goodness. The American desire to save the world, according to Brands, determined the fervor with which the Cold War was waged. He highlights the economic aspect, which, he notes, can be seen in retrospect as a massive effort to open foreign markets to U.S. products, and analyzes the Cold War as a long-running ``issue'' in American politics. With sly wit, Brands describes how Mikhail Gorbachev deprived this country of ``an enemy that could hardly have been improved upon'' and discusses the current awkward, enemy-less mode in which the U.S. finds itself as the government strives to develop a new national security agenda and politicians work out new campaign rhetoric to replace obsolete anticommunism. Brands is an assistant professor of history at Texas A & M and the author of Inside the Cold War. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

The Cold War, Texas A&M history professor Brands argues, "was no war at all, but simply the management of national interests in a world of competing powers . . . the sort of thing great powers had done as long as there had been great powers." The Cold War metaphor, however, "once established and institutionalized . . . developed a life of its own." Both internally and externally, the bipolar worldview's "conceptual simplicity" satisfied a shifting mix of U.S. needs and objectives, while obscuring the real threats and weaknesses of what President Reagan used to call "the Evil Empire." Brands' study deftly probes the interplay of psychological, strategic, economic, and political factors in forming--and then freezing--U.S. policy from the Marshall Plan to "Star Wars," from loyalty oaths to the Gulf War. Having lost the oversimplification that defined the last half-century, all the usual suspects now call for new paradigms: The Devil We Knew convincingly demonstrates the cost--to the U.S. and other nations, in lives and dollars, human rights and moral principle--of an unchallenged and unchallengeable paradigm that is "better as a literary device than as a description of international reality." ~--Mary Carroll

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

H.W. Brands was born Henry William Brands in Oregon. He graduated from Stanford University in 1975 with a B.A. in history, and from Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon. He went on to earn his graduate degree in mathematics and history in Oregon and Texas. He taught at Vanderbilt University and Texas A&M University before he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. He acquired the title of Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History at the U of Texas. He specializes in American History and politics, with books including Traitor to His Class, Andrew Jackson, The Age of Gold, the First American, and TR. Several of his books have been best sellers, including one recently published, The General vs. the President. Two of them - Traitor to His Class and The First American were finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lectures often on historical and current events and he can be seen and heard on national television and radio programs.

(Bowker Author Biography)