The Rockets' Red Glare

...For example, Barnet credits public opposition with shortening the Korean and Vietnam wars, preventing a wider war in Central America, and pushing Reagan toward nuclear arms reduction...

...Don't be fooled by the title...

...This warning was part of a massive propaganda campaign not to sell alcohol but to persuade the American people that fighting in the Great War, a war the government had previously portrayed as a senseless, Old World struggle, had become democracy's moral imperative...

...into battle...

...Besides, he has a keen eye for the archival gems collected by others...

...It is also the stuff of Richard Barnet's lively narrative history of foreign policy and public opinion over the last two centuries as the United States moved from newly independent republic with a a six-ship navy to global superpower with thousands of nuclear warheads...

...The mystery, I suppose, is that the public does not always buy the government's foreign policy sound bites...

...The Rockets' Red Glare is Barnet's first crack at a broad survey of American history...

...Barnet is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker...

...In his version of American history, public opinion doesn't start wars, presidents do...

...Thanks to elections, however, American leaders have tried ever harder to monitor and manage their clients' opinions...

...o long disdained...

...His arguments persuade because he does not exaggerate either the depth of antiwar activism or the level of public knowledge about foreign affairs...

...a virtue, along with an able pen, that makes this a far more interesting and readable volume than many in the genre...

...But this informative and accessible survey can surely inform a broad public whose opinions our leaders have so long disdained...

...But where's the mystery...

...Hoping to "engineer consent," the executive branch treats foreign policy "as a commodity to be sold rather than as a set of inescapably controversial ideas to be debated and understood...

...Barnet offers sensible opposition to the claim that public "war fever" typically drove the U.S...

...But the idea that America should lay claim to the entire continent was by no means a majority view at the time it was being pushed in Washington...

...And while most Americans in the 1940s and 1950s were surely anti-Communist, it is unlikely that they would have tolerated so great a military buildup, so global a policy of containment, or so vicious a campaign of witch hunts, had there not been such a concerted effort from the top down to "scare the hell out of the country" as Senator Vandenberg recommended to Truman in 1947...

...However, Bamet's history covers so much ground, and is so jam-packed with detail, it takes some raking to get at the key points...

...But it hardly can be otherwise in a work of this scope...

...His best-known works include: The Roots of War (1972)-a brilliant critique of the "national security managers" and institutions that led America into Vietnam...

...This is a political, not a military, history...

...He teaches us more about how our leaders have perceived public opinion, and sought to control it, than about the views of the people themselves...

...According to the Committee on Public Information, in a widely distributed pamphlet of 1917, German invaders will "demand wine for the officers and beer for the men...

...For example, throughout the 1980s, under an administration (Barnet claims) that did more than any in our history to manipulate public opinion, the majority of Americans opposed its policies in Central America...

...Instead, Barnet smartly points out that even common assumptions about the world can produce significantly different courses of action...

...Angered to find that an American town does not contain large quantities of either, they pillage and burn...

...The "red glare" is not a flash of battle, but the hyperbole of political rhetoric (as in "red scare...

...However impotent citizens may be to make policy, they can place checks on its execution...

...Public opinion" is indeed a complex matter and Richard Barnet has not fully plumbed its mysteries, or taken into account such variables as region, class, gender, and ethnicity...

...Christian Appy In case Germany attacks, better lay in some liquor...

...After all, the public, as Barnet persuasively shows, has had little or no choice in the making of foreign policy...

...Global Reach (1975)-a study of the vast power wielded by multinational corporations...

...In 1812, for example, it was President Madison's judgment, not the "ebb and flow of popular feeling," that produced the war Barnet nominates as America's second most unpopular (behind Vietnam...

...But Barnet finds consolation in the public's role as spoiler...

...And while Barnet finds considerable public support to liberate Cuba from Spanish imperial control in 1898, the simultaneous effort to grab the Philippines came "before the people had a chance to assess what they were doing, much less reject it...

...and The Alliance (1983)-a history of America's postwar relations with Western Europe and Japan...

...The war against Mexico was triggered by President Polk and the public was simply asked to support a fait accompli...

...He is most penetrating when analyzing his most familiar subject-the upper reaches of the American government...

...For two hundred years the managers of United States foreign policy have looked upon the American people as a lawyer regards a difficult client who gets in the way of the case...

...Academic historians, notoriously scrupulous about other people's research, may complain that Barnet bases most of this book on secondary sources...

...For example, Barnet concedes that most nineteenth-century Americans supported some westward expansion...

...He has written eleven books, primarily about the exercise of American power since World War II...

...The fact that these policies continued anyway is not heartening to seekers of a more democratic foreign policy...

...Barnet calls his book "an inquiry into the mysterious role of public opnion in the choice of war and peace...