In an important contribution to Cold War scholarship, Bill
(Government/Coll. of William and Mary) traces the foreign policy
career of "wise man" George Ball from the 1940s until his death in
1994. Bill briefly outlines Ball's upbringing as the intellectually
precocious son of a midwestern oil executive, his largely
dysfunctional marriage and relationship with his two sons, and his
role as counsel to the wartime Lend-Lease program and the US
Strategic Bombing Survey, among other aspects of his long career.
Avoiding the sweep of a full biography, however, the author focuses
primarily on Ball's policy preoccupations and accomplishments: his
concern with European political integration, his strong involvement
in Democratic Party affairs (especially in his friend Adlai
Stevenson's two presidential campaigns), and his service in the
State Department under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The author
analyzes in detail Ball's role in several major foreign-policy case
studies: European integration (he and friend Jean Monnet did more
than anyone else to bring the European Community into being), US
involvement in the Congo and Vietnam, and crises in Cuba, Cyprus,
and the Middle East. Ball was often eerily prescient. He strongly
favored British entry into the Common Market decades before it
happened, advocated a tunnel between Britain and France before the
"Chunnel" was on anyone's drawing board, and vigorously opposed US
involvement in Vietnam as a disaster almost from its inception.
Many criticized Ball, however, for remaining loyal to the
administration during the deepening Vietnam crisis despite his
strong feelings against the war; he resigned quietly in September
1966 and refrained from publicly criticizing Johnson for the
escalating bombing campaign. After leaving the State Department,
Ball continued to exert influence as a private citizen on such
issues as the Middle East crisis. Bill concludes that because of
his extraordinary prudence, characterized by pragmatic idealism,
Ball was the quintessential American statesman, one whose career
stands as a model for 21st-century statecraft. (Kirkus Reviews)
Diplomat and "wise man" George Ball wielded enormous influence in
American foreign policy for more than forty years. Best known for
his dissent from U.S. Vietnam policy when he was under secretary of
state during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he also
helped those administrations formulate policy concerning the
European Community, the Congo, the Cuban missile crisis, and
Cyprus. His last formal appointment was in 1968 as U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations, but he continued to advise and unofficially
assist presidents and members of the American political elite for
another twenty-five years, often taking contrary and critical
positions on the major issues of the day. In this book James Bill
offers fascinating new insights into the inner workings of foreign
policy by examining Ball's career and the political problems with
which he grappled. Drawing on Ball's personal archive as well as
extensive interviews with Ball and with dozens of his associates,
Bill traces Ball's involvement with foreign policy. He begins in
the 1940s, when Ball was a close associate of Jean Monnet, chief
architect of the European Community, and ends with Ball's death in
1994. He also chronicles Ball's forty-year involvement as a
founding member of the Bilderberg group, an international clique of
powerful European and American leaders. The book stresses a
seldom-recognized dimension of the U.S. foreign policymaking
process: the importance of the second tier of officialdom, the
level just below that of cabinet secretary. And it provides a
thoughtful comparison of the realpolitik model of statesmanship
practiced by Henry Kissinger and the phronesis practiced by Ball,
who was a prudent statesman guided bypractical wisdom within a
moral framework.
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