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Summary: A history of the Cold war during the Kennedy presidency
Review: John F. Kennedy's presidency took place at the height of the Cold war and this book is an authoritative study of his foreign policy during the period. It's refreshing when dealing with President Kennedy to be able to read something that goes beyond emotionalism, tenuous speculation and excessive proselytising and simply studies the concrete details of his administration's achievements. This is a serious, impeccably researched historical work which examines the key policy decisions and strategies of President Kennedy and his administration in dealing with the many international crises which punctuated his time in office. What the book succeeds in demonstrating is how President Kennedy, despite coming under intense pressures from the military, the public and his political opponents, was able to peacefully navigate through the most dangerous period of the Cold War and even eventually to reach an understanding with the Soviet Union on many issues. It is a significant achievement of his presidency, a product of his intelligence, intuition and judgement, an ability to clearly work through problems and find peaceful solutions, while preserving the United States' strategic position in the world. Mr Freedman makes it clear from the beginning that his subject should be taken in context. The book stands back from taking an objective look at the origins of the superpower confrontation and asking the serious questions as to the necessity of such a dangerous rivalry. This is not the object of the book, instead it is an assessment of the actions of a President who assumed office in the midst of "hostilities" as such. It would be foolish to believe Kennedy could have made an objective judgement as to the efficacy of the East-West divide and mould his decisions accordingly. He had only so much leeway in the face of the numerous pressure groups surrounding him. It is important however to consider how he dealt with these pressures and throughout the narrative an image emerges of a man who was genuinely concerned with making the world a less dangerous place. After in turn dealing with Berlin, Cuba and the Test Ban Treaty, the book at length discusses Southeast Asia and the nascent conflict in Vietnam, which Kennedy presided over in his final days. Historians and commentators of this period inevitably turn to the what-if scenario of President Kennedy surviving to serve his full term of office and then re-election in 1964. Would this have altered the course of US involvement in Southeast Asia and the Vietnam war? Mr Freedman makes it clear that this question cannot be answered with certainty and that at best one can only attempt to make an informed guess based on the pattern of Kennedy's decisions up to his death. However, such is the weight of this book that posing such a question does not seem like an entirely idle endeavour. It is on record that Kennedy was strongly opposed to the US becoming embroiled in a large scale military conflict in Southeast Asia and this viewpoint allowed the like-minded figures in his administration to initially dominate US policy in the region. Events subsequently took a different course after Kennedy's death under President Johnson who, as Mr Freedman shows, fatally allowed policy to be controlled by the hawks. In short, this book is a valuable addition to the history of the Cold war and while at times is written in such a way as to deter all but the most serious students of the period, is well worth the effort.
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Summary: Well Researched Objective History of Kennedy as Cold Warrior
Review: Sir Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, since 1982 and is an outstanding researcher and writer. This book is a very scholarly look at President Kennedy's performance in four hot spots of the Cold War: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. It's must reading for anyone who wants to understand Kennedy's approach to crisis management, also for those who think that Kennedy would have kept the Vietnam War from being an American war--that is, with Lyndon Johnson's later deployment of large numbers of American ground troops. Unlike the recent book Death of a Generation, by Howard Jones, which argues that Kennedy would never have turned Vietnam into an American war, Freedman's view is that we can't know what Kennedy would have done in 1965 when the government of Vietnam was on the brink of being defeated by a stepped-up Viet Cong insurgency. The situation in Vietnam during the years 1961 to 1963, covered by this book, was very different from that in 1965, when U.S. choices were very limited: basically either insert significant numbers of U.S. troops, or see South Vietnam fall to the communists, an unacceptable outcome for any American president at that time. The South Vietnames army was weak, and U.S. air power alone, used both in North and South Vietnam, could not alone have turned the tide (airpower never does, though today it has become an increasingly significant key to victory). Sir Lawrence has researched thousands of documents, summaries of administration meetings, and state department cables. His views are both documented and balanced. No one studying this period in U.S. and world history, and conflicts in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, can do without reading this first-rate book.
Rating:
Summary: Well Researched Objective History of Kennedy as Cold Warrior
Review: Sir Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, since 1982 and is an outstanding researcher and writer. This book is a very scholarly look at President Kennedy's performance in four hot spots of the Cold War: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. It's must reading for anyone who wants to understand Kennedy's approach to crisis management, also for those who think that Kennedy would have kept the Vietnam War from being an American war--that is, with Lyndon Johnson's later deployment of large numbers of American ground troops. Unlike the recent book Death of a Generation, by Howard Jones, which argues that Kennedy would never have turned Vietnam into an American war, Freedman's view is that we can't know what Kennedy would have done in 1965 when the government of Vietnam was on the brink of being defeated by a stepped-up Viet Cong insurgency. The situation in Vietnam during the years 1961 to 1963, covered by this book, was very different from that in 1965, when U.S. choices were very limited: basically either insert significant numbers of U.S. troops, or see South Vietnam fall to the communists, an unacceptable outcome for any American president at that time. The South Vietnames army was weak, and U.S. air power alone, used both in North and South Vietnam, could not alone have turned the tide (airpower never does, though today it has become an increasingly significant key to victory). Sir Lawrence has researched thousands of documents, summaries of administration meetings, and state department cables. His views are both documented and balanced. No one studying this period in U.S. and world history, and conflicts in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, can do without reading this first-rate book.
Rating:
Summary: "John F. Kennedy as Cold Warrior: One Crisis After Another"
Review: This book about John F. Kennedy's foreign policy focuses on the United States' confrontation with the Soviet Union over Berlin 1961, the nearly cataclysmic events in Cuba, and the deepening U.S. involvement in Indochina, which culminated in the overthrow and murder of the prime minister of South Vietnam just weeks before President Kennedy, himself, was assassinated. Is it appropriate to emphasize "wars" in a book about foreign policy? The answer, of course, is: Yes. Author Lawrence Freedman, one of Britain's leading authorities on the Cold War, does not expressly invoke Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but every reader knows that diplomacy and military power often are inextricably linked. On few occasions in American history has this been more true than during the "High" Cold War, the dangerous period between the first Berlin crisis in 1948 and the Cuba missile crisis in 1962. Freedman's fascinating, if occasionally frustrating book, examines the relationship between foreign and military policy at a time when U.S. and the Soviet Union confronted each other, directly or through surrogates, in venues throughout the world, several of which could have, by a single miscalculation, led to nuclear Armageddon. If John Kennedy genuinely deserves of the judgment of history as great, it is because of the remarkably cool judgment during the missile crisis. According to Freedman, Kennedy followed this advice in a book written by British military historian and strategist Basil Liddell Hart, which Kennedy reviewed shortly before his election: "Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face." The Soviet Union may have been foolish, if not reckless, to send nuclear missiles to Cuba, but, once they were there, the only way Nikita Khrushchev could remove them was through a political bargain which allowed his country to avoid international humiliation. If Kennedy had not allowed Khrushchev to save face, some sort of military confrontation, if not general nuclear war, would have been inevitable. Kennedy's decision not to take the advice of his more hawkish advisers was one of the great profiles in courage in the history of the American presidency. Kennedy defused the Berlin and Cuban crisis, but the war in Vietnam was well on its way to disaster when Kennedy died. Would anything have changed if he had lived? It is, to be sure, impossible to say. Shortly before he was assassinated, President Kennedy met with George Ball, a senior State Department official, to discuss Vietnam. When Ball spoke of the possibility of a war involving 300,000 American troops and lasting five years, Freedman reports that Kennedy reacted with "asperity," stating: "George, I always thought you were one of the brightest guys in town, but you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen." Freedman notes that Ball was uncertain whether the president was "making a prediction that events would not follow this line or that he would not let such a situation develop." In any event, we now know that George Ball was, indeed, one of Washington's most astute policy-makers, that Kennedy's assassination prevented him from determining the course of American policy in southeast Asia, and that the American commitment in Vietnam reached a peak of over 500,000 troops and lasted nearly 12 years before it ended in failure. I admire Freedman's cogent presentation of the Kennedy-era military crises in just over 400 pages. That includes a brief, but most welcomed, digression into the rift between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the early 1960s. The relaxation of the United States' confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Kennedy administration simply cannot be understood without reference to Sino-Soviet relations. I must candidly concede that, if Freedman had pursued other, similar digressions, the text would have approached 600 pages, and I then would be critical of its length. Nevertheless, I disagree with some of his choices. Every book must begin somewhere and the introduction to this one starts with a short summary of Kennedy family history. Most readers are familiar with the most salient points: The overbearing Joseph P. Kennedy was almost pathologically ambitious for his sons; after the eldest, Joseph, Jr., was killed in combat during World War II, the mantle fell to John, who had spent his early manhood as a playboy; after the war, JFK was elected first to the House of Representatives and then to the Senate but distinguished himself in neither body and was generally dismissed as a handsome, glib lightweight. Instead of rehashing that, Freedman should have devoted more space to Kennedy's role in the "missile gap" controversy of the late 1950s. It was one of the issues which brought Kennedy to national prominence, and it is significant for the fact that, by the time Kennedy was elected in November 1960, if any missile gap existed, it favored the United States. Consider this scenario: Within weeks of taking office, several of President Kennedy's key aides, principally National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara realized that the U.S. was superior to the Soviet Union in the missile race; having lost the missile gap as an issue, but under pressure to make good on Kennedy's campaign promise to increase defense spending, the administration decided to take a more aggressive stance elsewhere. The Soviet Union clearly provoked the 1961 Berlin crisis, but "Kennedy's wars" in Cuba and southeast Asia resulted from the new administration's deliberate effort to confront the international Communist menace wherever they found it. I doubt that Kennedy's Wars will change many minds about John Kennedy's legacy. His partisans will continue to view Kennedy's unexpected and untimely death as one of the great lost opportunities of the 20th century. Critics will find in this book further ammunition for their position that Kennedy must be judged by what he did and based on his charisma and soaring rhetoric. Nevertheless, this book must be read by anyone who wants to understand why the 1000-day Camelot era was one military crisis after another.
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Summary: The Playboy President Goes to War
Review: While JFK was idolized and glorified by the press, his image has not withstood the test of time. Thus, Mr. Freedman tries to portray a more objective history of Kennedy's foreign policy. Mr. Freedman does a remarkable job drawing on various sources to examine JFK and his NSC staff and how they approached various global hotspots in the early 1960s. The Kennedy that emerges is hardly a man "willing to bare any burden," for world freedom, but rather a President constantly concerned with his own popularity. Rather than make decisive decisions in the national interest, JFK constantly focused on the publics response. The quality of a great leader is a man who can make tough decisions and then explain to and convince the nation why they were just. Unfortunately, JFK was not able to stand up to difficult circumstances in Cuba and Laos and then tried to pretend that the problems did not exist. Therefore, nuclear war almost broke out and the Ho Chi Minh Trail led to the fall of Saigon. Perhaps the greatest lesson of JFK's foreign policy, as interpreted by Freedman, is the flawed 'graduated response' idea. The idea of using minimal force in response to aggression in hopes of detering your enemy only led and will always lead to escalation, a prolonged war, and massive casualties. Thankfully, in the U.S. today we have the Powell Doctrine to avoid such a flawed foreign policy. My only complaint with the book was that it was to soft in regards to Kennedy but, nonetheless, it is by far the best work on the 35th U.S. President.
Rating:
Summary: The Playboy President Goes to War
Review: While JFK was idolized and glorified by the press, his image has not withstood the test of time. Thus, Mr. Freedman tries to portray a more objective history of Kennedy's foreign policy. Mr. Freedman does a remarkable job drawing on various sources to examine JFK and his NSC staff and how they approached various global hotspots in the early 1960s. The Kennedy that emerges is hardly a man "willing to bare any burden," for world freedom, but rather a President constantly concerned with his own popularity. Rather than make decisive decisions in the national interest, JFK constantly focused on the publics response. The quality of a great leader is a man who can make tough decisions and then explain to and convince the nation why they were just. Unfortunately, JFK was not able to stand up to difficult circumstances in Cuba and Laos and then tried to pretend that the problems did not exist. Therefore, nuclear war almost broke out and the Ho Chi Minh Trail led to the fall of Saigon. Perhaps the greatest lesson of JFK's foreign policy, as interpreted by Freedman, is the flawed 'graduated response' idea. The idea of using minimal force in response to aggression in hopes of detering your enemy only led and will always lead to escalation, a prolonged war, and massive casualties. Thankfully, in the U.S. today we have the Powell Doctrine to avoid such a flawed foreign policy. My only complaint with the book was that it was to soft in regards to Kennedy but, nonetheless, it is by far the best work on the 35th U.S. President.
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