Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy in the Fifties eds. by Richard A. Melanson, David Mayers (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 129 industrial sociology and psychology as key intellectual replacements. In the meantime, private funding was needed to erect permanent buildings, finally opened "across the river" in 1927, to get free of borrowed space from Harvard College. By 1938, cash reserves stood at $24,000, the endowment at $3 million. The Depression and Second World War forced both administration and faculty to rethink their mission. After Pearl Harbor, a variety of initiatives were needed simply to retain faculty and fill dormitories (fifty percent of operating expenses came from educational programs), and avoid another wartime shut-down. A close relationship with the military services and a burgeoning aircraft industry were the result. Whether these relationships would survive the anticipated downturn of postwar demobilization, however, where Cruikshank ends this volume, was of course impossible to predict. As the above summary suggests, institutional creativity and change are Cruikshank's central theme. He is fascinated by the School's "tradition of invention,'' and he makes a persuasive case for an institution •'willing and able to reinvent itself" (280). He gives both external and internal factors attention in organizational analysis, shows appropriate sensitivity to the market-driven features of Harvard's growth strategy, and generally satisfies his aim to make the volume both an intellectual history and a study in institution building, at least within the limits of a gorgeous display book of Harvard memorabilia. (The competition between narrative and visual display is like following a story through the ad-drenched pages of the New York Times Sunday magazine.) For Canadian readers, however, the central question is this: what would have happened if William Lyon MacKenzie King had accepted the offer of Harvard President Eliot in 1908, to become the first Business School Dean, or, a little later, an offer by Gay to join the faculty? (38-39, 44). Inspiration for an historical novel by E. L. Doctorow, to be sure, but also grounds for the further question: could HBS have actually survived Industry and Humanity in the early stages of a delicate, institutional experiment? Robert Cuff Department of History York University, Toronto Richard A. Melanson and David Mayers, eds. Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy in the Fifties. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 277 pp. No twentieth-century American president's historical reputation has rebounded more spectacularly in the last two decades than Dwight D. Eisenhower's. Whereas an early 1960s poll of historians placed Eisenhower twenty-second 130 Shorter Book Reviews among American presidents, miredbetween Andrew Johnson and Chester Arthur, a similar poll conducted in 1984 ranked him in the top ten. The conventional, negative image of Eisenhower's presidential leadership, largely the creation of liberal critics, has collided with a more favourable image, originating in the late 1960s in the eye-opening journalistic commentaries of Murray Kempton, Gary Wills and others, and since expounded in a spate of books and articles. '' Eisenhower revisionism'' has resuited mainly from changes in the scholarly climate of opinion and access to new documentation. In light of Vietnam, the failed War on Poverty, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, America's slide from economic pre-eminence, and now the Iran-Contra fiasco, Eisenhower's presidency arguably can be judged the most successful of the post-1945 era. In addition, new documentation has made possible a much better-informed understanding of Eisenhower's views, modus operandi, and the objectives and actions of his administration. As Richard A. Melanson and David Mayers state in their preface, a '' full-scale reappraisal of Eisenhower" is now underway, but as yet there is no "definitive evaluation," particularly regarding foreign affairs (1, 5). Their purpose, in this collection of essays, is not to offer the finalword on Eisenhower's foreign policy, but to acquaint readers with the current state of scholarship. The volume contains nine essays, several by established scholars, but most by younger historians and political scientists. Many of the essays use recently available documents. The collection does not endorse any one perspective; instead, it presents a diversity of opinion. The volume has two parts. The first on "Eisenhower's Public Philosophy" contains two overviews, one by Melanson and the other by Kenneth W. Thompson, the noted international relations scholar. Thompson...