becoming the country’s first Secretary of Defence, before personal and political paranoia exploded in a leap to his death from a hospital window.
16The extensive record of such scares is surveyed in John A. Thompson, ‘The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition’, Diplomatic History, Winter 1992, pp. 23–43, who concludes: ‘The dramatic extension of America’s overseas involvement and commitments in the past hundred years has reflected a growth of power rather the decline of security. Yet the full and effective deployment of that power has required from the American people disciplines and sacrifices that they are prepared to sustain only if they are persuaded the nation’s safety is directly at stake’. Among the results have been ‘the expansion of national security to include the upholding of American values and the maintenance of world order’, and ‘the recurrent tendency to exaggerate the country’s vulnerability to attack’.
17For the leading Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis this was, admirably, a long-standing tradition of the country: ‘Expansion, we have assumed, is the path to security’: Surprise, Security and the American Experience, Cambridge, MA 2004, p. 13.
18‘Fair Day Adieu!’ and ‘The Prerequisites: Notes on Problems of the United States in 1938’, documents still kept under wraps—the fullest summary is in Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, pp. 49–55. For a cogent discussion of Kennan’s outlook in these texts, see Joshua Botts, ‘“Nothing to Seek and … Nothing to Defend”: George F. Kennan’s Core Values and American Foreign Policy, 1938–1993’, Diplomatic History, November 2006, pp. 839–66.
19Acheson: interview with Theodore Wilson and Richard McKinzie, 30 June 1971. Johnson was cruder still: ‘We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr Ambassador’, he told an envoy, after drawling an expletive, ‘If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long’: Philip Deane [Gerassimos Gigantes], I Should Have Died, London 1976, pp. 113–4. Nixon and Kissinger could be no less colourful.
20John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War, Chapel Hill 2000, pp. 44, 23; Lloyd Gardner, in Gardner, Schlesinger, Morgenthau, The Origins of The Cold War, Ann Arbor 1970, p. 8. In 1933, Roosevelt could in all seriousness warn Litvinov that on his deathbed he would want ‘to make his peace with God’, adding ‘God will punish you Russians if you go on persecuting the church’: David Foglesong, The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire’, Cambridge 2007, p. 77.
21Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, New York 1968, p. 429.
22Kennedy inaugural, 20 January 1961: ‘The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God’; George W. Bush, speech to the International Jewish B’nai B’rith Convention, 28 August 2000; Obama inaugural, 20 January 2009: ‘This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny’—an address reminding his audience, inter alia, of the heroism of those who fought for freedom at Gettysburg and Khe Sanh.
23McCormick, America’s Half-Century, p. 77. Business Week could afford to be blunter, observing that the task of the US government was ‘keeping capitalism afloat in the Mediterranean—and in Europe’, while in the Middle East ‘it is already certain that business has an enormous stake in whatever role the United States is to play’.
24McCormick, America’s Half-Century, p. xiii.
25Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–1947, New York 1972, pp. 353, 356–8, 360–1. In a preface to the re-edition of the book in 2000, Gaddis congratulated himself on his good fortune, as a student in Texas, in feeling no obligation ‘to condemn the American establishment and all its works’: p. x.
26Gaddis, ‘The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis and the Origins of the Cold War’; Diplomatic History, July 1983, pp. 181–3.
27Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, New York 1982, p. viii, passim. Gaddis had by then become Kennan’s leading exegete, earning his passage to official biographer, and the sobriquet ‘godfather of containment’. For the latter, see Sarah-Jane Corke, US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare and the CIA, 1945–1953, pp. 39–42 ff.
28Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford 1997, pp. 51, 199–201, 280, 286–7, 292.
29Gaddis, ‘And Now This: Lessons from the Old Era for the New One’, in Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, eds, The Age of Terror, New York 2001, p. 21; Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, pp. 115, 117. For ‘one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V’, prompting comparison of Afghanistan with Agincourt, see pp. 82, 92; and further pp. 115, 117. In due course Gaddis would write speeches for the Texan president.
30For the successive phases of this historiography, see Stephanson, ‘The United States’, in David Reynolds, ed., The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives, New Haven 1994, pp. 25–48. A shorter update is contained in John Lamberton Harper, The Cold War, Oxford 2011, pp. 83–9, a graceful work that is now the best synthesis in the field.
31For the degree of Leffler’s rejection of Gaddis’s version of the Cold War, see his biting demolition of We Now Know: ‘The Cold War: What Do “We Now Know”?’, American Historical Review, April 1999, pp. 501–24. He had started to question it as early as 1984: ‘The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–48’, American Historical Review, April 1984, pp. 346–81.
32In 1990, Kolko added a preface to the re-publication of The Politics of War that extends its argument to comparative reflections on the German and Japanese regimes and their rulers, and the differing political outcomes of French and German popular experiences of the war: a text of exceptional brilliance.
33Tackled by Bruce Cumings for his failure either to address or even mention the work of Kolko, or more generally the Wisconsin School of historians descending from Williams, Leffler could only reply defensively that for him, ‘the writings of William Appleman Williams still provide the best foundation for the architectural reconfigurations that I envision’ since ‘Williams captured the essential truth that American foreign policy has revolved around the expansion of American territory, commerce and culture’—a trinity, however, of which only the last figures significantly in his work on the Cold War. See, for this exchange, Michael Hogan, ed., America in the World: The Historiography
