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  • The Donkey, the Carrot, and the Club: William C. Bullitt and Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1948
  • Eduard Mark
Michael Cassella-Blackburn, The Donkey, the Carrot, and the Club: William C. Bullitt and Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1948. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. 267 pp. $69.95

Within the covers of Michael Cassella-Blackburn's new biography of William C. Bullitt, two quite different books vie with each other. The kernel is a well-researched [End Page 170] study of Bullitt's public career. That kernel, however, is embedded in an interpretation of U.S.-Soviet relations that contains many errors and is conceptually deficient.

Bullitt's career has about it the fascination of tragedy. He was a sort of American Alcibiades—a man of great gifts undone by defects of personality and character. He possessed many of the traits of an excellent diplomat: intelligence, charm, mastery of languages, and at times almost prophetic powers of discernment. But he sabotaged his public career with tactless outbursts and acts of insubordination that owed much to a passionate nature and deep convictions—and to arrogance and deficient self-control. He performed many acts of kindness, but envy and ambition prompted him to launch a vicious and ill-conceived attack on Sumner Welles that miscarried badly, permanently alienating President Franklin Roosevelt and removing Bullitt from the corridors of power. He had reached a point where few trusted him. In that respect, too, he was like Alcibiades.

It is scarcely surprising that such a gifted but deeply flawed figure has attracted the attention of many scholars. Cassella-Blackburn's study is, however, the first to make extensive use of the Russian archives. With the help of newly available documents his book gives us the most complete account available in English of the negotiations that led to U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. (He shows, for example, that, as has long been suspected, the overriding consideration for the Soviet Union was to win some kind of American support against the Japanese, although a loan from the United States was not a negligible consideration, either.) Cassella-Blackburn's assessment of the controversial issues between the United States and the Soviet Union is balanced. (He shows that Soviet officials were probably justified in arguing that the United States promised credits rather than a loan during Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov's visit in 1933, but he allows that they were plainly disingenuous when they pledged not to interfere in America's internal affairs.) Particularly interesting is the portrayal of Bullitt as not simply a diplomatic intermediary but an aspiring policymaker who brought to these disputes his personal values and demons, not always to good effect.

The less satisfactory part of the book is Cassella-Blackburn's depiction of the international setting through which Bullitt worked his tortuous way. He presents the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union as mere caricatures. He argues that U.S. policies were a function of "international liberalism," whereas those of the Soviet Union were driven by a simple need for security. In this there is an implicit argument: As American policy embodied an active principle (the transformational ideology of "international liberalism") and the Soviet policy a passive one (security), the United States was ipso facto more responsible for the Cold War.

Casella-Blackburn cites Melvyn P. Leffler's A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), but he seems unaware of what made that book so important—namely, its demonstration that the European balance of power was no less significant for the United States than for the Soviet Union. The perception that the United States could neither prosper nor be safe if Europe fell into hostile hand was crucial in shaping [End Page 171] American statecraft from the late 1930s through the early Cold War. The salience of this view does not afford a complete explanation of American foreign policy, but it does offer a sufficient explanation insofar as policy would have been little different even if no other motives had been present.

But because the book focuses on Bullitt, the more pertinent issue is Cassella...

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