Our Age After Innocence
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Our Age After Innocence In the Time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur—The Generation that Changed America's Role in the World By David Fromkin Knopf. 618pp....
...That is an attractive formulation, but with the Roosevelt-Churchill partnership the barrier had been crumbling for some time...
...Ponder, for instance, the following excerpt from a letter young Captain Truman wrote in 1919 after glimpsing Woodrow Wilson in Paris: "I am very anxious that Woodie cease his gallivantin' around and send us home and quickly...
...Other readers may discover explications of events they lived through or have heard about and be edified accordingly...
...The most interesting parts of the book are those revolving around the way the lives of the principal figures were intertwined...
...so why should we be kept over here to browbeat a Peace Conference that'll skin us anyway...
...As battle clouds gather once more while Roosevelt is implementing the New Deal, what emerges most clearly is his determination to avoid repeating Wilson's mistakes...
...I found especially intriguing the account of Theodore Roosevelt's earnest effort to get his cousin Franklin to resign his job in Washington and don his country's uniform when the U.S...
...Such is the material for rumination here, the stuff of a terrible epoch that no historian can hope to fully fathom on his own, let alone in one volume...
...It is indeed a detailed presentation, yet scholars will find little new here...
...Perhaps the author, who teaches international relations at Boston University, dwells on Bullitt's dramatic comings and goings because they considerably enliven the narrative...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University THERE IS a curious past-tenseness to David Fromkin's book, as if the glory days of the United States belong now to yesteryear...
...He begins his tale of The Generation that Changed America's Role in the World with an apology: "I wanted this to be a shorter book, but couldn't manage it: There was too much ground to cover...
...Of course, history never repeats itself, and Fromkin does not claim the contrary...
...from the turn of the century until the end of the Cold War the United States enjoyed a remarkable success in fastening its will on the big international questions, and that appears to be over...
...entered the Great War...
...The chapters on the years between the Wars splendidly illuminate this shift (though they fail to adequately explore the well-springs of American isolationism...
...Roosevelt made his own mistakes...
...After much posturing and blustering, which included a trip to the Western Front in his capacity as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (a visitation that Fromkin does not mention), FDR remained a civilian "far from the sea battles of the North Atlantic...
...The book shows abundantly, too, that the interwar years were truly the time of the "long armistice," and that not inflicting a larger defeat on Germany in 1918 was a blunder that has shaped the history of almost our entire century...
...Fromkin attributes an importance to him that most other writers would eschew...
...Was it his mother's influence that kept Franklin at home, or his recently-begun and still clandestine attachment to Lucy Mercer...
...The shortcomings of In the Time of the Americans notwithstanding, the record of America's full-scale entry into international affairs has never been more engagingly offered...
...On every page there is an assertion, an anecdote, a choice quotation that will make the reader stop to reflect...
...The consequent gloom ought to lift when we note that the Americanization of the globe has continued?even accelerated—through movies, television and other cultural exports, not to mention the impact of millions of American tourists on peoples everywhere...
...But there is no overriding theme to act as a binder for the vast quantity of fascinating, though sometimes overwhelming, minutiae...
...The same feeling pervaded the recent 50th anniversary celebrations of World War II's great and bloody climaxes...
...The tragedy of Wilson was always somewhere within the rim of his consciousness...
...It was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, says Fromkin, that breached American isolation once and for all—returning, in a way, the service Matthew Perry had performed for Japan in opening it to the world in 1853-54...
...The Hun is whipped...
...Truman's metamorphosis was paradigmatic of the transmutation that took place in the thinking of the nation at large...
...Those words contrast sharply with the ones President Truman used 26 years later in lecturing Vyacheslav M. Molotov on Soviet misbehavior...
...Although Fromkin happens not to point it out, MacArthur, Harry S. Truman and George C. Marshall all took part in the battle of Meuse-Argonne—a defining episode for each of them and for the period generally...
...Fromkin, however, limits himself to war and diplomacy...
...Nor is there an alluring interpretation to focus attention, unless it be the constant and somewhat dubious references to Ambassador William C. Bullitt, Franklin D. Roosevelt's quondam friend, whom the President sacked at a critical juncture in the War...
...When FDR prepared his speeches, Robert Sherwood wrote, "he would look up at the portrait of Woodrow Wil son over the mantelpiece...
...In fact, all this has created a force independent of foreign affairs that still has not reached its zenith...
...That may also explain why, despite his rich subject matter, Fromkin delights in recounting salacious tidbits that contemporaries usually ignored or were not aware of...
...The interconnections provide historical perspective...
...It might have served the author's purpose better to offer a spirited helping of domestic political gossip, which can have a seductiveness of its own...
...But David Fromkin has aimed high and he deserves credit for his boldness...
...Or was it something deeper and more difficult to talk about, like personal fear—a subject he would raise memorably 16 years later in his first Inaugural...
...It is not entirely off the mark...
...As far as we're concerned most of us don't give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether Russia has a Red government or no government...
...These include some paragraphs on Douglas MacArthur and his Asian mistress, on the personal travails of James V Forrestal, and yet again, on the dalliances of Franklin Roosevelt...
...30.00...
Vol. 78 • September 1995 • No. 7
