Congress and the Cold War (review)

Near the beginning of Congress and the Cold War,Robert David Johnson aptly quotes the late scholar and Senator Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who once observed that "the neglect of congressional history is something of a scandal in the American scholarship" (p. xxii). Moynihan was right. Occasionally, significant scholarly histories of events on Capitol Hill appear, but this happens far less often than the publication of important books on the U.S. presidency or the Supreme Court.

The relative paucity of scholarly work on Congress is attributable to many factors, among which is the sheer complexity of the institution. As I tell my students, "There are two bodies of Congress, not one, and each body does its most significant work in a multitude of committees and subcommittees." Moreover, any historian of Congress must deal with the challenge of describing a body with 535 members.

Another reason for the relative lack of attention to Congress, surely, is that the president has usually played a dominant role in U.S. foreign policymaking since World War II. The salience of the president's role, the fact that a single individual holds the presidency, and the manifold difficulties of researching and writing effectively about Congress all lead to the result that Moynihan described.

Despite these challenges, Johnson has produced an important study of Congress in the realm of foreign policy from the early Cold War period through the era of Ronald Reagan. His topic is huge, given the vast number of issues that arose during the long Cold War. Johnson's book cannot and does not deal with all of these issues, and his treatment of the late Cold War period lacks the depth of his coverage of the 1940s through the early 1980s. Nonetheless, Congress and the Cold Waris a notably detailed and accomplished history of much that unfolded on Capitol Hill with great significance for U.S. policies abroad. The book is based on Johnson's scrutiny of primary sources from literally dozens of archives holding the papers of mostly deceased leaders and other members of both houses of Congress.

Archival research is hardly an uncommon activity on the part of historians (though it is done infrequently by political scientists), but it is fair to say that archives holding the papers of late members of Congress do not receive as many research visitors as they should. Johnson's extensive research into such holdings scattered around the country will earn him the thanks of anyone interested in the history of the U.S. government.

The narrative of Congress and the Cold Waris organized around the successive importance of blocs of legislators, including "internationalist Republicans" who more or less assisted the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, "revisionists" who challenged their policies, "conservatives" who fought against various presidents' foreign aid policies, and "dissident liberals" who prodded the U.S. government to cut off aid to governments that were in some ways pro-American but oppressed their own citizenry. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, "new internationalists" fought with occasional success in limiting U.S. support to dictatorships abroad and in challenging presidential power at home. Many of their successes, however, were overturned in the Reagan era.

Johnson tells many stories from his half-century timeframe that remind us of the human dimension of Congress. He tells us, for example, about Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a Republican from Massachusetts who was one of the early internationalists. Lodge was no profound thinker, but Johnson writes that Lodge worked hard in favor of an "'unpartisan' approach to world affairs, in which the opposition party would function as 'the voice of conscience,' undertaking a 'calm and deliberate reappraisal of the facts' while offering 'constructive suggestions'" (p. 17). U.S. foreign aid and diplomatic policies during the early Cold War were shaped as much by the efforts of Lodge and certain congressional colleagues as they were by Harry S. Truman, Dean Acheson, and others in the executive branch.

One of Johnson's best portraits is of Stuart Symington...