The American Midwest and the Early Cold War

William Langer (North Dakota), Henrik Shipstead (Minnesota), Robert Taft (Ohio), Arthur Capper (Kansas), Charles Wayland Brooks (Illinois), Kenneth Wherry (Nebraska), Forrest Donnell (Missouri), William Jenner (Indiana), these were the names of a number of prominent isolationist members of the Congress from the Midwest during the early Cold War era. In the same period, however, this region was home to two significant internationalist politicians, Harry Truman (Missouri) and Arthur Vandenberg (Michigan), who have both been the focus of the recent monographs mentioned above.

In his book entitled Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, Robert Ferrell, one of the main biographers of Truman, castigates the group of historians known as the revisionists who have undertaken to disparage the foreign policy of the thirty-third American president since the 1960s. Among them were Gar Alperovitz, Barton Bernstein and Lloyd Gardner. For the prolific scholar, who reminds that the conventional military strength of the United States in 1945–1950 was far from impressive, such an indictment is profoundly irrelevant to the basic idea of revision in history: "Th ere is nothing wrong … with the notion … of revisionism, taken by itself. My generation of historians, who began their studies in the years just after the war of 1941–1945 … appreciated the essays of the best-known historian of the time, Charles A. Beard, who declared that revision was the essence of scholarship. … We are all revisionists." Adds the eminent historian: "But the [C]old [W]ar revisionists who attacked … Truman did not understand the time in which he was president nor the man himself."¹

Based on various primary sources (e.g., Truman papers, Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States and memoirs of Dean Acheson), Ferrell's brief monograph particularly flays the three main theories advanced by the revisionists for the year 1945. The first one lies in the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt was "a subtle, sophisticated operator in foreign relations … and that President Truman was pretty much the opposite." The second theory consists in the conviction that the American nation, after the Yalta Conference, "sought to intervene in Russia's security zone in Eastern Europe, trying to gain influence, perhaps even dominance, over the cordon sanitaire of weak nations lying between Western Europe and the Soviet borders." The third hypothesis held by the revisionists, and notably Gar Alperovitz in its controversial Atomic Diplomacy (1965), was that the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, "not so much to end the war … but to impress the Russians, who were giving trouble in Eastern Europe." Concerning this last assumption, Ferrell stresses that an invasion of Japan would have definitely cost far more casualties than some nuclear revisionists had believed, asserting that the invasion of Luzon and Okinawa had cost respectively 31,000 and 63,000 U.S. casualties.²

Although Ferrell's volume exhibits several strengths (cogency of the overall demonstration, accuracy of facts, etc.), readers familiar with Truman's foreign policy, and acquainted for instance with the works of scholars on the atomic bomb such as Robert Maddox and J. Samuel Walker, will hardly find novelty in this book.

In his monograph The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, Lawrence Kaplan, an expert on NATO, aims to follow "the odyssey of a major political figure from arch-isolationism in the 1930s to ardent internationalism after World War II." For the author, who consulted the rich Vandenberg papers located at the Bentley Library (University of Michigan), the Midwest senator played a pivotal role in the conversion of...