A useful historical study that will especially interest those seeking a look at government from the inside.
A former chief speechwriter at the Pentagon expands his doctoral dissertation to demonstrate how the National Security Council has become one of the dominant forces in shaping American foreign policy.
Relying on a combination of academic research and less formal anecdotes, Gans, who runs the Global Order Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, shifts back and forth between admiration for the NSC and warnings that the mostly publicity-shy staff members have accumulated too much influence without being overseen by anybody outside the White House. The agency was originally created in 1947 to coordinate sensitive, divergent foreign policy recommendations emanating from the armed services, the Defense Department, the State Department, the CIA, and other elements, and its staffers—not subject to confirmation by the Senate or any other body independent of the president—have become a “band of warriors” for the White House. Gans identifies high-profile national security advisers to every president, beginning with Harry Truman’s group of advisers and moving through Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Henry McMaster, and others. A chief value of the book, though, is the author’s focus on case studies about how less-visible staff have exerted influence. These include Alexander Vershbow and Nelson Drew, who shaped Bosnian genocide intervention during the Bill Clinton presidency. To establish his theme early, Gans opens the book with scenes suggesting the influence of NSC staff member Meghan O’Sullivan on the controversial decision of George W. Bush to invade Iraq. Perhaps the most dramatic, revealing section occurs during the Ronald Reagan presidency, as the NSC gained the influence to implement foreign policy, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal and the loss of American lives to terrorists in Lebanon. The author also offers up-to-date research about the role of the presidency of Barack Obama, and he squeezes in a few pages of impressions about the chaos of the NSC during the Trump era.
A useful historical study that will especially interest those seeking a look at government from the inside.Pub Date: April 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-456-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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