You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Marigold presents the first rigorously documented, in-depth story of one of the Vietnam War's last great mysteries: the secret peace initiative, codenamed "Marigold," that sought to end the war in 1966. The initiative failed, the war dragged on for another seven years, and this episode sank into history as an unresolved controversy. Antiwar critics claimed President Johnson had bungled (or, worse, deliberately sabotaged) a breakthrough by bombing Hanoi on the eve of a planned secret U.S.-North Vietnamese encounter in Poland. Yet, LBJ and top aides angrily insisted that Poland never had authority to arrange direct talks and Hanoi was not ready to negotiate. This book uses new evidence from long hidden communist sources to show that, in fact, Poland was authorized by Hanoi to open direct contacts and that Hanoi had committed to entering talks with Washington. It reveals LBJ's personal role in bombing Hanoi as he utterly disregarded the pleas of both the Polish and his own senior advisors. The historical implications of missing this opportunity are immense: Marigold might have ended the war years earlier, saving thousands of lives, and dramatically changed U.S. political history.
James B. Conant (1893-1978) was one of the titans of mid-20th-century American history, attaining prominence and power in multiple fields. Usually remembered as an educational leader, he was president of Harvard University for two tumultuous decades, from the Depression to World War II to the Cold War and McCarthyism. To take that job he gave up a scientific career as one of the country’s top chemists, and he left it twenty years later to become Eisenhower’s top diplomat in postwar Germany. Hershberg’s prize-winning study, however, examines a critical aspect of Conant’s life that was long obscured by government secrecy: his pivotal role in the birth of the nuclear age. During World W...
Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award Winner of the U.S.–Russia Relations Book Prize A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable—the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans’ fight to d...
This volume examines the origins and early years of the Cold War in the first comprehensive historical reexamination of the period. A team of leading scholars shows how the conflict evolved from the geopolitical, ideological, economic and sociopolitical environments of the two world wars and interwar period.
James B. Conant (1893-1978) was one of the giants of the American establishment in the twentieth century. President of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953, he was also a scientist who led the US government's effort to develop weapons of mass destruction, and his story mirrors the transition of the United States from isolationism to global superpower at the dawn of the nuclear age. 'This splendid portrait of Conant ... illuminates the life of a pivotal figure in the making of US nuclear, scientific, educational, and foreign policy for almost half a century. But the book is much more: it is not only an insightful narration of Conant's life, it is also a brilliant and important account of the making of the nuclear age, a chronicle that contains much that is new.' TheWashington Post 'The bomb would be as much Conant's as it was anyone's in government. His inner response to that burden of responsibility has long been obscured, but it is illumined here ... This is a model of historiography that is evocative reading.' The New York Times Book Review 'Vibrantly written and compelling, it breaches Conant's shield of public discretion in masterly fashion ...
James B. Conant (1893-1978) was one of the titans of mid-20th-century American history, attaining prominence and power in multiple fields. Usually remembered as an educational leader, he was president of Harvard University for two tumultuous decades, from the Depression to World War II to the Cold War and McCarthyism. To take that job he gave up a scientific career as one of the country’s top chemists, and he left it twenty years later to become Eisenhower’s top diplomat in postwar Germany. Hershberg’s prize-winning study, however, examines a critical aspect of Conant’s life that was long obscured by government secrecy: his pivotal role in the birth of the nuclear age. During World W...
This book examines the deterioration of relations between the USSR and China in the 1960s, whereby once powerful allies became estranged, competitive, and increasingly hostile neighbors. It shows how the intrinsic inequality of the Sino-Soviet alliance - seen as entirely natural by the Russians but bitterly resented by the Chinese - resulted in its ultimate collapse.
"James B. Conant was a towering figure who stood at the center of the great crises and challenges of the twentieth century. He shaped national policy as a scientist, nuclear pioneer, Cold War statesman, diplomat, and educational reformer for nearly fifty years. As a brilliant young chemist, he supervised the production of poison gas in WWI. As the Nazi threat loomed, he boldly led the interventionist cause in WWII and was tapped by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be one of the scientific chiefs at the helm of the Manhattan Project, personally overseeing the massive secret effort to develop the atomic bomb. He went on to become one of America's first cold warriors, led the bitter fight to ...
Based on new archival research in many countries, this volume broadens the context of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Its primary focus is on relations between China and Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century; but the book also deals with China's relations with Cambodia, U.S. dealings with both China and Vietnam, French attitudes toward Vietnam and China, and Soviet views of Vietnam and China. Contributors from seven countries range from senior scholars and officials with decades of experience to young academics just finishing their dissertations. The general impact of this work is to internationalize the history of the Vietnam War, going well beyond the long-standing focus on the role of the United States.
"Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike an...