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CHOICE Review

Brands examines the formulation of foreign policy during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He does so by focusing on Eisenhower and eight other men who did more than any other advisors to put together that policy. Brands divides the nine into three groups: 1) the inner circle--John Foster Dulles, chief architect and Secretary of State; Milton Eisenhower, his brother's closest advisor; and Allen Dulles, head of the CIA; 2) the lieutenants who did not so much devise policy as they did execute and refine policy--Walter Bedell Smith and Robert Murphy; 3) the agitators and agents who were influential in certain specific areas--C. D. Jackson, Harold Stassen, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Brands uses his study of the views and influence of each of these men to assess both specific policy areas and overall operating assumptions. Their shared experience of WW II resulted in an administration's "legacy at once of excess and of deficiency." Brands notes that their experience with the horrors and difficulties of modern war made these men properly cautious behind their bellicose rhetoric. Their successors, the Kennedy advisers, inherited the arrogance and slogans but not the experience, and mistakenly believed their "best and brightest" men would win their war. College and university libraries. -J. P. Hobbs, North Carolina State University