The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, 1957-1960, and: The Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1949-1999 (review)

As long ago as the 1950s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) began to document their own evolution in a series of historical studies. Intended for internal use, presumably by staffers seeking an overall picture of the institution or of where it had stood on some issue, the histories parallel those that have been published in recent years about the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Like the OSD histories, those that cover the JCS attempt to analyse the most prominent military issues of the day and sketch the contributions of the Joint Chiefs toward resolution of those issues, while also outlining the evolution of the institution itself. In this pair of volumes, the Fairchild and Poole book is the latest entry in the joint history saga, while the second volume is something of a hybrid, a sketch of the role of the JCS chairman, about which more presently.

The JCS history is actually the seventh volume of a much more extensive series. It is a series that grew (like topsy?) from studies of the Joint Chiefs' role in World War II and then in Indochina to a general history of the work of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These red books are now to be distinguished from the JCS history on Vietnam, which subject has largely been excluded from the general series and is the subject of a separate series of volumes (currently on track for separate and near-term publication). This volume of the JCS history covers the organization of the Chiefs (with some material on defense decision making in general), and the status of the debate at that time on "massive retaliation," and contains extensive material on military budgets, force levels, and the foreign assistance program. There is a good chapter on the "Missile Gap," with a detailed discussion of service positions on ICBM building programs (but not nearly the level of detail found in the parallel OSD history volume), and a very useful chapter on JCS deliberations about the Eisenhower administration's efforts at nuclear test ban negotiations and other arms control measures.

The real strength of this history lies in its treatment of regional crises, however. This owes something to the background of this volume of the JCS series. Previous books had a very institutional flavor and focused on such programmatic issues as budgets and the Joint Strategic Operations Plan. This book, originally written in the 1960s, mostly by Dr. Byron Fairchild (but in fact with five other scholars contributing or editing), lay in classified vaults for decades. During the early 1990s Dr. Walter Poole, as part of a new effort to publish all the OSD and JCS histories, took this one in hand and gave it a somewhat different cast, expanding material on the continental and regional issues, adding three chapters to the work and rewriting others. There are now two chapters each on Europe and NATO, on the Far East, and on the Middle East. There are also chapters on Cuba and, in something of a first, on the Central Treaty Organization. The account of the JCS in Africa (essentially its role in the Congo) is a definite advance over previous knowledge in this area. This book is worth the attention of anyone who is working on the period.

The unattributed volume on the chairmanship of the JCS was actually prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chairman of the JCS and was largely written by Walter S. Poole...