Editor's Note

This issue marks the end of the seventh year of the journal. Preparations for Volumes 8 and 9 are moving rapidly along, and we look forward to continuing to publish the best scholarship about the Cold War and its implications.

The current issue begins with an article by Christopher Tudda about the Eisenhower administration's strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He argues that the policy of "liberation" enunciated by President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—a policy they claimed would replace the Truman administration's "timid" approach to the Soviet bloc—was never more than public rhetoric. Eisenhower and Dulles, Tudda contends, believed that attempts to "liberate" Eastern Europe through direct or indirect military action would provoke a strong Soviet response and possibly lead to all-out war, something they did not want to risk. Hence, in private they consistently rejected the notion of pursuing military liberation. Although a few of Eisenhower's advisers, such as C. D. Jackson, wanted to implement the liberation policy through concrete action, the president himself was far more cautious. The problem for Eisenhower and Dulles, however, was that their public rhetoric generated expectations in Eastern Europe that they themselves were unwilling to meet. Although the East German uprising in June 1953 and the Hungarian revolution in October–November 1956 broke out because of widespread indigenous opposition to the Communist regimes, the evidence suggests that some of those who rebelled did so in the hope that the United States and other Western countries would come to their defense or at least provide them with military aid. The disjuncture between the administration's public pronouncements and its actual intentions was exposed when the United States stood by while the Soviet Army crushed these two rebellions.

The next article, by Max Holland, looks at the role of William Pawley, an illustrious businessman and former U.S. ambassador to Brazil and Peru, in the overthrow of the Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, in June 1954. In the Fall 1999 issue of the journal, Holland published an article that discussed Pawley's cameo role in the Cuban missile crisis. In this latest article, Holland shows that Pawley played a considerably more important part in Operation PBSUCCESS, the codename given by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to the covert actions designed to force Arbenz to step down. Although Pawley held no formal government post at the time (his stints at the State Department and Defense Department ended in September 1952), he was asked by President Eisenhower in May 1954 to undertake important assignments in connection with PBSUCCESS. In particular, Pawley made a vigorous—and ultimately successful—effort to ensure that the United States would provide additional air support to the anti-Arbenz rebels, a gesture that was of great symbolic importance. The covert operation to remove Arbenz was a highly secretive affair, and Pawley's role in it was kept especially secret. Only now, with the release of highly classified documents and Pawley's unpublished memoirs, is it possible to trace his activities. Holland argues that Eisenhower's reliance on Pawley both in 1954 and afterward sheds new light on the "state-private network" that functioned in the United States throughout the Cold War. Private groups and individuals often influenced key government decisions and occasionally helped with the implementation of those decisions, as Pawley did in 1954.

The third article in this issue, by Nicholas Sarantakes, examines the allegorical treatment of the Cold War in the original Star Trek television series, which aired from September 1966 to June 1969. As a devoted fan of the show—from the time I first saw it in reruns in the 1970s and early 1980s—I have to confess a certain delight in publishing this article. But even readers who have never seen Star Trek or who (heaven forbid) dislike it will benefit a great deal from the article. Sarantakes draws on the show's production files (now stored in the special collections division of the Arts Library at the University of California at Los Angeles) and on first-hand accounts by key figures involved in the series...