Strategies of Containment

...Three factors account for the bewildering swings...

...Nor for that matter, no one on the East Coast, save Kennan himself...

...The United States will steadfastly oppose that danger and seek to strengthen the established processes of international law and order...

...Gaddis brought out his book early in 1982 and had no opportunity to judge the foreign policy of the Reagan Administration...

...At the very moment I write, from the heart of the Midwest, Independence, Missouri, I have in hand a letter from Professor William Picket't of Rose-Hulman Polytechnic who is working away nearby, 155 miles down Interstate 70, in Abilene, and he has uncovered remarkable rewrites of Dulles's periods, one of them released just a year ago...

...A copy of NSC-68 in the Truman Library in Independence, annotated perhaps by Truman's assistant George Elsey, contains all sorts of remarks about the essay's stupidities...

...It is possible to argue with Gaddis's stress on NSC-68, a badly written, hard-line, silly essay about "the master of the Kremlin...

...The framework of Gaddis's book strikes me as the best analysis presently available for what has happened since the Truman Administration adopted containment in March 1947...

...a symmetrical (all-out) approach requires money, and Democratic administrations, believers in Keynes-ian economics, invariably have found themselves attracted to symmetry...

...That was clear enough...

...Dulles then drafted a reply, which Ike edited with a very sharp pencil...

...The President of that time assuredly knew little about its authorship...

...In subsequent years, Gaddis shows, officials wobbled between "symmetry" and "asymmetry," that is, trying to oppose Communism on every front, and seeking to solve the large challenges and let the little ones go...

...Gaddis apologizes for being a "lumper" rather than a "splitter," for dealing with a large subject, a third of a century of American-Russian relations...

...he quotes Elizabeth Drew's left-handed observation that "of all the many people I have discussed the subject of Brzezinski with, hardly any have used the word 'thoughtful.' " At the book's end he relates why strategies of containment moved back and forth, from symmetrical (all-out) to asymmetrical...

...Gaddis's style, especially at the book's end where he touches the simplicities of the Carter Administration, likewise carries the reader...

...Athens, Ohio...

...At the time of the Lebanon intervention in 1958, Khrushchev protested to the President in a letter of July 19...

...And so does the quality of the writing and analysis...

...Like Kennan he refuses to make bold commentaries without blurring the edges...

...Truman's economic advisers in his early years were, conservative...

...One is domestic politics-with the exception of NSC-68 in 1950, each change came with a new administration...

...Perhaps, however, Eisenhower had more control over Dulles than Gaddis admits...

...Analysis of symmetry (meeting all challenges, Watchman on the Walls) and asymmetry proceeds with quotation and commentary in careful proportion, although Gaddis is such a clever writer that he might have relegated more of the quotation to the notes...

...This book is an intellectual triumph...

...The change in policy, from the Abstention Doctrine of George Washington, opened with drama, the President's speech before Congress in which he proposed $400 million for protection of Greece and Turkey...

...Often Ike fuzzed up Dulles's simplicities, turning them into questions rather than statements, wording them into a sort of military jargon that lost their straightforwardness...

...Truman undoubtedly approved it, but that may not say that he read it, or read it carefully...

...Another is need to make a strategy credible, which greatly limits ideal arrangements...

...Ike changed it to read: "I am not aware of any factual basis for your extravagantly expressed fear of the danger of general war.'' Later the original reads: "I am compelled to conclude, Mr...

...Chairman, from the recent conduct of the Soviet Union, that it seeks by war scares, including ballistic missile threats, to divert attention from the steady erosion of the independence of small nations and the increasing use of violence, murder and terrorism as instruments of international policy...

...The above account stands as a sort of poster for what Gaddis subtly develops...

...Who could believe that in the ail-American junkyard melange of fast-food drive-ins along Route 24 in Independence, and among the churches and grain elevators of Abilene, lie such treasures...

...The task was formidable, but much came to hand, almost all of it after the closed period for records of the federal government in Washington, about the year 1950...

...X" article in Foreign Affairs and set out the need to stand up to the Soviet Union...

...It is not too much to say that Gaddis is the new Kennan, that what college and university students of a generation ago found so exhilarating about Kennan reappears in the long sweep of ideas, the lilting prose, the penetrating clarities of this Sage of Robert H. Ferrell is Distinguished Professor of History at Indiana University and author, most recently, o/Harry S. Truman and The Modern American Presidency {Little, Brown...

...A great deal of Gaddis's success comes from willingness to search out information...

...But when Leon Keyser-ling, an ebullient man who believes in everything he says, became chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers he converted Truman to economic expansionism, and NSC-68 became possible...

...Lastly he demonstrates the primary requisite of economics...

...It is this attitude that constitutes the real danger to peace...

...In 1959 when two writers were taping him in preparation for a book they asked him about Nitze, and his response was a total, absolute blank-"Who's he...

...in a news-sensitive country like the United States, where people read the morning newspaper on the way to work, and leave the evening newspaper in the bushes while they watch headline snippets on television, new s in whatever form is important, statements obtain attention, and while much of it is trivial (who remembers the Carter Doctrine of recent years...

...Detente lasted until the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan...

...Ike changed it to the following: "Am I to conclude, Mr...

...Chairman, that the Soviet Union seeks by imputing war motives and itself boasting of its nuclear and ballistic missile power, to divert attention from the steady erosion of the independence of small nations...

...Who can refuse so convincing an exposition as the following, about Jimmy Carter: "He prided himself on being simultaneously an engineer and a moralist, a combination conducive to self-confidence, to be sure, but also to a certain fascination with technical and ultimate questions that left little room for the realm of strategy that.lay somewhere in between...

...Many years ago Ohio University at Athens was the premier educational institution of its state, and then gave way to the behemoth of Columbus, but no one in Columbus writes like John Gaddis...

...Still, the enlargement of American policy in 1950 to include not merely Korea but Indochina did take on the appearance of symmetry...

...Gaddis sees four major strategies of containment after its initial statement: the National Security Council document numbered 68-NSC-68-of 1950 (symmetry), Eisenhower's "new look" of 1953 (asymmetry), flexible response of 1961 (symmetry), and detente of 1969 (asymmetry...

...It is possible also to fault Gaddis on his view of Eisenhower...

...If so, this constitutes the real danger to peace...

...a great deal of truth lies behind the cliches...

...governments have to package ideas...

...but the size of his canvas makes the book extraordinarily attractive...

...He ably shows how a succession of national security advisers explained the strategies: Kennan, Nitze, Dulles, Rostow, Kissinger...

...The Truman Administration in 1947 started out well, Gaddis believes, with a modest (asymmetrical) statement of containment, despite the inclusive wording of the Truman Doctrine...

...As he shows, Ike was critical of Dulles, whom he described as an international prosecuting attorney...

...And he has watched for public statements that reveal...

...The original draft, according to Bill, reads: "I am not aware of any danger of war unless indeed war be the purpose of the Soviet Union...

...At the outset he rightly demonstrates how important was the elegant prose of the first describer of containment...

...It is easy to advise an attractive author as to what he should write next, and so to the Sage of Athens goes this advice, to write a little book of two hundred pages or less about foreign policy from Carter to Reagan, from Brzezinski to Allen and what's-his-name, Kennan's successor today...

...Are we as civilized peoples, to accept the increasing use of violence, murder and terrorism as instruments of international policy...

...10.95 paper Robert H. Ferrell VJnce in a while, sometimes after many years, a book comes along that changes understanding of large issues, and such is John Gaddis's essay on strategies of containment- a generalizing, wonderfully literate, thoughtful account of American foreign policy since 1947, since George F. Kennan published the "Mr...

...His appraisal of Brzezinski, given in a few pages at the end, is scathing...

...For the rest Gaddis has relied on declassi-fication through the Freedom of Information Act...

...It is indeed the blurring that makes the book so convincing...

...Presidential libraries, notably at Independence and Abilene, contain fascinating statements, formal and informal, the latter often in personal letters...