Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (review)

The Vietnam War remains a compelling subject for Americans both inside and outside the academy. Undergraduates flock to classes on the war and the domestic political turbulence that accompanied it. Scholars of history, international relations, political science, and sociology continue to analyze how and why the United States became involved. Journalists, filmmakers, and politicians also have weighed in on the factors that led U.S. policymakers to embark on a conflict that proved so costly in so many respects. Nonetheless, according to Robert Dean in Imperial Brotherhood, most Americans have overlooked or underestimated one of the key reasons for the U.S. embroilment in Vietnam. Dean argues that "elite masculinity" (p.18) played a central role in the escalation of the war. His book seeks to provide a broad context for understanding the significance of gender—that is, historically specific and culturally constructed meanings of masculinity—to American foreign policy before and during theVietnam War. Dean's extremely intelligent monograph achieves this goal very effectively.

Dean begins by exploring the codes of gender that developed in institutions dominated by upper-class white males. From the turn of the century onward, politicians-to-be (or the "foreign policy establishment") came of age at East Coast prep schools, exclusive clubs, Ivy League colleges, and the like. These privileged male enclaves helped to produce a gender ethos that equated manliness with certain qualities and experiences, including athletic prowess, public service to the state, voluntary (and hopefully heroic) military service, and a loyalty to the community that blurred with conformity. Over several decades, this gender ethos helped to create and reproduce a patriotism that regarded military intervention abroad as the key to expanding American power. By the post-World War II period, members of the foreign policy establishment celebrated a global, military-oriented American power, even though they publicly condemned empires and imperialism.

Dean then focuses on the 1940s and 1950s, probing the links between anti-Communism and homophobia—both of which were virulent in the foreign policy establishment during that period. In three strong chapters that provide broad overviews and vivid case studies, Dean shows the extent to which a common underlying logic connected these crusades against political and sexual dangers. Government officials who were accused of being Communists and those who were accused of being homosexuals were depicted as weak, subversive, and out of step with the codes of masculinity that conferred political legitimacy. Not only did purges of suspected Communists and homosexuals eliminate from the State Department career diplomats with expertise in Asia, they also had a far-reaching discursive impact, according to Dean: A discourse that equated appeasement and weakness with homosexuality strengthened a hardline, imperial anti-Communism based on military aggression. Many were reluctant to challenge ongoing intervention in Vietnam lest they, too, appear suspect. Consequently, despite abundant evidence of the futility of deeper military involvement in Vietnam, officials who escalated the war could imagine other options only with great difficulty. A gendered logic of American power had narrowed policymakers' "repertoire of possibilities" (p.3).

This brief summary does not do justice to the creative arguments put forth in Imperial Brotherhood, nor does it convey the many contributions the book makes. Although Dean may sometimes stretch his evidence in making such a direct causal link with Vietnam, his argument about the centrality of gender in the calculations of senior officials is compelling. He does an especially splendid job of weaving together post-World War II anti-Communism and the simultaneous homosexual panic of that period. Dean systematically and convincingly connects the "politics of countersubversion and counterperversion" (p.167). For this reason alone, the book is a significant accomplishment, for it bridges boundaries between studies of "public" and "private" life and between foreign and domestic policy. After reading Imperial Brotherhood, it is virtually impossible to relegate sexuality to a terrain beyond or separate from so-called "real" politics. Dean's research is impressive and...