Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War by H. Bruce Franklin (review)

There are two fundamental ways of discussing the roots of foreign policy. One is Primat der Innenpolitik ("the primacy of domestic politics"), the view that domestic policy and the needs of the domestic economic structure determine foreign policy. The other is Primat der Aussenpolitik ("the primacy of external relations"), the view that pressure from external competitors and predators is what determines foreign policy. The debate is not over whether external and internal policies are interdependent (scholars accept that they are) but over which has primacy in government thinking and decision-making. H. Bruce Franklin, holder of a chair in English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, has always been a proponent of the first view of the sources of U.S. foreign policy—that they are internal and founded on the influence of wealthy elites and the military-industrial complex. His latest book is no different. The problem with this first view is that it creates a picture of the world in which the only real actor is the United States, behaving in a predatory manner for reasons of capitalist-imperialist ideology, culture, and economics. All the other states on the planet are, fundamentally, the victims, passive and relatively inoffensive.

Franklin's new book is a mixture of memoir entwined with standard Marxist analysis. The parts of it that are memoir are charming: for instance, his memory of visiting the 1939 New York World's Fair with his mother—a visit that set in motion Franklin's lifelong fascination with science fiction (he is an authority on the science-fiction novelist Robert H. Heinlein). During his military service in the latter half of the 1950s, he was also part of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, a navigator on a flying tanker for B-47 bombers. He includes a hair-raising account of attempting midair refueling on a pitch-dark winter night in fog over the featureless Arctic (the bomber ended up directly below the tanker). To this Franklin adds a chilling analysis of the B-47 scandal of the late 1950s, when scores of this early turbojet bomber were falling out of the skies because of long-term metal stress at the base of their wings (including one B-47 that exploded directly behind Franklin's own KC 97 Stratotanker almost over Buffalo, New York). Franklin's account of the Air Force cover-up is equally appalling. No one who reads Franklin will ever see Jimmy Stewart's film Strategic Air Command (1955), in the same light. Stewart at the time was a colonel in the Air Force, and his character idolizes the B-47 ("the most beautiful thing I've ever seen")—just as these planes were beginning to crash in large numbers.

For Franklin, however, the U.S. war in Vietnam was what transformed his world-view. His account of his role and that of his wife, Jane Morgan, from 1965 onward in trying to prevent the export of napalm from its main manufacturer (whose plant was only twenty miles south of Haight-Ashbury) is a fascinating example of what a small local group of protesters can do.

But these chapters of memoir alternate with a Marxist analysis in which the United States is always the villain. Franklin justifies the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, imposed on millions of unwilling subjects, as a defensive and understandable buffer zone against Western aggression (p. 74). He claims that in the Korean War it was actually South Korea that invaded North Korea in June 1950, not the spectacular reverse—or at least that the South was planning to invade (p. 53). He believes that the late-1950s air patrols of the Soviet frontier in the Arctic were not a defensive project but a "provocation" that was perhaps even intended to instigate a war with the USSR (pp. 113, 126–129). He believes that President John Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy involving the...