In an important contribution to modern US government and policy
studies, Hogan (History/Ohio State Univ.) traces the development of
America's national security apparatus in the first decade of the
Cold War. For much of its history, the US took to heart the advice
of George Washington to avoid entangling alliances and involvement
in foreign affairs. Accordingly, as it matured, America pursued a
policy of nonintervention in foreign wars (except in Latin
America), and enjoyed an antistatist and antimilitarist domestic
culture. While America was becoming an active international power
in the years prior to WWII, isolationism still characterized
American policy on the eve of that war. The Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor transformed the domestic policy consensus:
isolationism was no longer viewed as a practical policy, and
America had to bear the burden of its own defense. Hogan argues
that, in the first decade following the conclusion of WWII,
advocates of the new ideology of military security came into
conflict with proponents of the older values. He contends that the
emerging national security state was largely the presidential
creation of Harry Truman, who attempted to reconcile the two camps,
and of Dwight Eisenhower, who feared the development of a garrison
state but recognized the need to end the isolationist policy of the
past. The tension between the two ideologies could play out within
the same individual, as was the case with Truman and some others.
Often, the tension carved out divisions along party and
institutional lines (the national security ideology was associated
more with the Democratic party and the executive branch, and the
older culture more with the Republican party and the Congress).
What resulted, Hogan concludes, was a compromise: while the
political, military, and intelligence organs of the national
security state proliferated, the nation's democratic values and
principles of civilian control prevented the nation from becoming a
total garrison state. An absorbing, provocative study. (Kirkus
Reviews)
A Cross of Iron provides the fullest account yet of the national security state that emerged in the first decade of the Cold War. Michael J. Hogan traces the process of state-making through struggles to unify the armed forces, harness science to military purposes, mobilize military manpower, control the defense budget, and distribute the cost of defense across the economy. President Harry S. Truman and his successor were in the middle of a fundamental contest over the nation's political identity and postwar purpose, and their efforts determined the size and shape of the national security state that finally emerged.
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