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BOOK REVIEWS James Lloyd Glucksman, editor Baer, G.W., ed., A Question of Trust ....................... 272 Bahry, D., Outside Moscow ................................. 273 Bennett, J., The Hunger Machine ........................... 274 Bonner, A., Among the Afghans ............................ 276 Celmer, M.A., Terrorism, U.S. Strategy, and Reagan Policies .. .277 Clough, R.N., Embattled Korea ............................. 279 Farnsworth and Mozolin, Contract Law in the USSR and the United States ........................................... 280 Feld, W.J., Arms Control and the Atlantic Community ......... 282 Frost, E. L., For Richer, For Poorer .......................... 283 Garthoff, R. L., Policy Versus the Law ....................... 285 Holmes, M., et. al., British Security Policy and the Atlantic Alliance ................................................ 286 Katzenstein, PJ. , Policy and Politics in West Germany ......... 288 LaPalombara, J., Democracy, Italian Style ................... 289 Riddell, R.C, Foreign Aid Reconsidered ..................... 290 Ronning and Vannucci, Ambassadors in Foreign Policy ........ 292 Wiarda and Falcoff, The Communist Challenge in the Caribbean and Central America ........................... 294 271 272 SAIS REVIEW A Question of Trust: The Origins of U.S.-Soviet Relations: The Memoirs of Loy W. Hendersen. Edited by George W. Baer. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986. 579 pp. $44.95/cloth. Reviewed by James Voorhees, Ph.D. candidate, SAIS. The men who opened the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1934 were extraordinary. Two of them, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, should be familiar to all who have studied relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the decades that followed. In their memoirs both men effusively praise Loy Hendersen , who was their boss in 1934 and who came to play no small part in the diplomacy of the United States. A Question of Trust is Hendersen's account of those formative years in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Hendersen began his career as an officer in the Red Cross after World War I. Sent to the Baltic coast in 1919, he witnessed the birth of Lithuania and Latvia in the midst of confusion as German armies retreated, Russian soldiers were repatriated, mercenary armies burst forward and collapsed, patriot armies triumphed, White Russian armies disintegrated, and the shadow of the Bolsheviks was felt everywhere. Hendersen joined the Foreign Service almost by accident. After being posted in Ireland during the formation ofthat republic, he became involved with East European affairs in Washington and later in Riga, which served as a window on Russia in the 1920s. He was in Washington again in 1933, when diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union was negotiated, and was posted to Moscow in 1934 as a last-minute replacement. In 1938 he returned to Washington to serve as chief of the State Department's East European Area through 1942. Because of his proximity to events, Hendersen gives an account of U.S.Soviet relations in the 1930s that is indispensable. The memoirs, which benefit from excerpts of working documents (by Hendersen and others) clearly portray the perceptions of U.S. policymakers at the time. In Hendersen's view the Soviets (commissar of foreign affairs Litvinov in particular) failed to follow through on certain agreements made to gain American recognition. In one case, when the Comintern met on Soviet soil in 1935, with U.S. communists on prominent display, the perceived violation was taken so seriously that a break in relations was considered. It now seems somewhat naive to have expected the Soviets to behave otherwise, but such collisions of American values and Soviet policies helped form the views that guided Hendersen, Kennan, and other architects of U.S. foreign policy. Hendersen also describes the increasing fear felt by Muscovites as the Great Purge ran its course. He sat behind Karl Radek at the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev and "noted the red flush that crept up the back of his neck" when his name was first mentioned by a defendant. (Radek was tried and convicted several months later.) Many of Hendersen's portraits of the men he worked with are valuable. Litvinov seemed to him vain and somewhat churlish; others have pictured him in a far more flattering light. To Hendersen, a thirty-year-old Gromyko was shy, awkward, persistent, and unemotional. AmbassadorJoseph Davies, famed BOOK REVIEWS 273 for his blindness to Stalin's dark side, fares slightly better in this account than elsewhere, partly...

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