Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace (review)

The field of Cold War history has been undergoing a salutary expansion recently, as more scholars have explored themes, regions, and topics that until recently had been relegated to the margins of the literature. One aspect of this expansion has been the increasing attention paid to countries and regions in the global South, with the most prominent recent example of this trend being Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Another facet, related to the first, is the growth of international development and modernization programs as a topic of study well summarized recently in a special issue of Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (June 2009), especially in the opening essay by David C. Engerman and Corinna R. Unger, "Introduction: Toward a Global History of Modernization" (pp. 3-21). This shift has meant that we have slowly but surely been evolving from a view of Cold War history as one that unfolded primarily along an East-West axis—with the United States and the Soviet Union at either end and Europe firmly at its center—toward a multifaceted perspective that accords increasing importance to North-South interactions.

Kristin Ahlberg's new book makes a useful contribution to this literature. Her topic is the history of the U.S. international food aid program, which first emerged under Dwight D. Eisenhower and reached its peak during the administration of Lyndon Johnson. The book makes two main points. First, it outlines how international food aid, codified in 1954 in U.S. Public Law 480, evolved from a program driven primarily by domestic pressures to dispose of surplus agricultural production to one that became, by the mid-1960s, a conscious and important component of U.S. foreign policy. The second point concerns the complexity of the motivations of U.S. officials, particularly of Johnson himself. As Ahlberg convincingly shows, Johnson's support for the Food for Peace program was shaped by a humanitarian desire to globalize the Great Society and fight hunger worldwide and, at the same time, by a hard-nosed if usually unsuccessful effort to use food aid to influence the policies of recipient countries.

Ahlberg proceeds methodically, opening with three chapters that trace the development of U.S. food aid from its origins in the 1950s as a program to unload surplus grains through the maturation of the program in the 1960s under John F. Kennedy (who renamed the program Food for Peace) and especially under Johnson, as it became a full-fledged component of U.S. foreign policy. Having established this general framework, she then proceeds to explore the diverse contexts and uses of the program in three case study chapters, looking at the role of the Food for Peace program in U.S. relations with India, Israel, and South Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. Motivations and results, she finds, varied considerably across these cases. In India, Johnson sought to use the program to alleviate hunger but also kept food aid on a "short tether" in a largely futile attempt to influence Indian foreign policy in America's favor. Israel presents another picture entirely. U.S. food aid to Israel had no humanitarian justification and served instead as a form of indirect military assistance, freeing Israeli funds for arms purchases. South Vietnam was different yet again, with food aid serving as an important part of the failed U.S. effort to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people.

In focusing on international development and U.S. policy in the Third World, Transplanting the Great Society sits at the cutting edge of current trends in Cold War history. In other ways, however, the book hews to a more traditional path. The scope of its interest is essentially limited to tracing the formation of U.S. policy, and its research, though prodigious, is largely confined to U.S. official documents. Thus, readers can learn quite...