ROBERT DAVID JOHNSON. Congress and the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xxxii, 346. Cloth $70.00, paper $29.95
2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.112.4.1205
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Military and Defense Studies
ResumoInterpretations of American foreign policy since 1945 have tended to underestimate the impact of Congress upon policy making: in contrast to the period before Pearl Harbor, the era of the Cold War appeared to demonstrate the power of the executive, qualified by the repercussions of McCarthyism in the 1950s and the consequences of Watergate in the 1970s. Robert David Johnson has produced a carefully argued and thorough reassessment of the role played by Congress: he shows that the executive had to devote more time and energy to coping with the assertiveness of certain committee chairmen and individual legislators than has been recognized previously. Johnson has researched a large number of collections of private papers, with the help of those acknowledged, supplemented with the Congressional Record and newspapers. He focuses mainly on the Senate but also brings out the importance of the House of Representatives at particular times. Johnson underlines the constructive contributions of Republicans Arthur H. Vandenberg, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and H. Alexander Smith in the later 1940s; they were more prominent than Democrats Tom Connally and Walter George, provoking the jealousy of the latter (pp. 22–23). The Korean War accentuated anxiety and tension, and the author emphasizes the malign influence of Pat McCarran, the maverick Democrat, rather than Joseph McCarthy (p. 53). Much of the geographical concentration in Congress shifted from Europe to Asia, as the menace of “Red China” loomed large. William F. Knowland succeeded Robert A. Taft, Sr., as Republican leader in the Senate; Knowland was obsessed with support of Chiang Kai-shek's regime, and the “Senator for Formosa” was a veritable thorn in the side of the Eisenhower administration. However, passage of the “Formosa resolution” (1955) was followed by a weakening in the power of Congress in criticizing the executive. Democratic Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy were well to the fore in condemning incompetent French rule in Indochina, but the challenges of constructing viable governments, combining nationalism with anticommunism, were more difficult than they anticipated, as both came to appreciate in the 1960s.
Referência(s)