Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars havelabored to uncover the facts behind Chambers s shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948 that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the left and the right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post Cold War era. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post World War II eraand then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties."

A history professor describes the events during the year World War II ended, beginning a new era of prosperity in America, rebirth and rebuilding in Europe, and the start of the Cold War era

Chronologische Darstellung der geheimen Kriegsführung der CIA seit 1945.

"A brilliant and visionary argument for America's role as the defender of peace and order throughout the world--and what is likely to happen if we abandon our long-term commitments. Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward going it alone or withdrawing in the face of such disarray. In this powerful, urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons that American withdrawal or a selfish unilateralism would be the worst possible response, based on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse. Kagan makes clear how the "realist" impulse to recognize our limitations and focus on our failures misunderstands the essential role America has played for decades in keeping the world's worst instability in check. A true realism, he argues, means understanding that the historical norm has always been toward chaos--that the jungle will grow back, if we let it"--

A United Nations insider exposes the ugly truth about the UN—including how UN organizations have been funding terrorist groups! In the New York Times bestseller Tower of Babble , former United Nations ambassador Dore Gold blows the lid off the UN’s shocking failures to keep international peace, its corruption, its rampant anti-Americanism, and its emboldening of terrorist organizations. Citing previously unpublished documents, a brand-new chapter exclusive to this paperback edition provides the untold story of the infamous oil-for-food scandal—including the real scandal, that the UN let oil-for-food money go to fund terrorist organizations.

With the same uncompromising style that characterized his breakthrough, Vietnam-era writings, Toward a New Cold War extends Chomsky's critique of U.S. foreign policy through the early 1970s to Ronald Reagan's first term. Expanding on themes such as the cozy relationship of intellectuals to the state and American adventurism after World War II, Chomsky goes on to examine the way that U.S. policymakers set about the task of rewriting the horrible history of involvement in Indochina and turned their attention more squarely on the Middle East and Central America. Chomsky also assesses U.S. oil strategy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dissects the first volume of Kissinger's memoirs, issues an urgent call to stem the bloodshed in then-unknown East Timor and, in the title essay, marks the increased posture of confrontation and rearmament under presidents Carter and Reagan that signaled the end of d�tente with the Soviet Union. Featuring a new foreword by internationally acclaimed journalist John Pilger, this is the fifth in a series of Chomsky's classic political works reissued by The New Press. The others are American Power and the New Mandarins , For Reasons of State , Problems of Knowledge and Freedom , and Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship .

"In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing"--

"In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing"--

Predicts an imminent global political crisis, including a dangerous rivalry between America and China and a breakdown of the European Union, citing key events and contributors that have culminated in present-day instabilities.

In the 1930s a band of smart and able young men, some still in their twenties, helped Franklin D. Roosevelt transform an American nation in crisis. They were the junior officers of the New Deal. Thomas G. Corcoran, Benjamin V. Cohen, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, and James Rowe helped FDR build the modern Democratic Party into a progressive coalition whose command over power and ideas during the next three decades seemed politically invincible. This is the first book about this group of Rooseveltians and their linkage to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Vietnam War debacle. Michael Janeway grew up inside this world. His father, Eliot Janeway, business editor of Time and a star writer for Fortune and Life magazines, was part of this circle, strategizing and practicing politics as well as reporting on these men. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of events and previously unavailable private letters and other documents, Janeway crafts a riveting account of the exercise of power during the New Deal and its aftermath. He shows how these men were at the nexus of reform impulses at the electoral level with reform thinking in the social sciences and the law and explains how this potent fusion helped build the contemporary American state. Since that time efforts to reinvent government by "brains trust" have largely failed in the U.S. In the last quarter of the twentieth century American politics ceased to function as a blend of broad coalition building and reform agenda setting, rooted in a consensus of belief in the efficacy of modern government. Can a progressive coalition of ideas and power come together again? The Fall of the House of Roosevelt makes such a prospect both alluring and daunting.

An analysis of American politics from Lyndon Johnson's administration to the present is arranged by such themes as campaigns, the media, and wars, in a volume that illuminates particular events in modern history.

"Diplomacy is essential to the conduct of foreign policy and international business in the twenty-first century. Yet, few international actors are trained to understand or practice effective diplomacy. Poor diplomacy has contributed to repeated setbacks for the United States and other major powers in the last decade. Drawing on deep historical research, this book aims to 'reinvent' diplomacy for our current era. The original and comparative research provides a foundation for thinking about what successful outreach, negotiation, and relationship-building with foreign actors should look like. Instead of focusing only on failures, as most studies do, this one interrogates success. The book provides a framework for defining successful diplomacy and implementing it in diverse contexts. Chapters analyze the activities of diverse diplomats (including state and non-state actors) in enduring cases, including: post-WWII relief, the rise of the non-aligned movement, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the U.S. opening to China, the Camp David Accords, the reunification of Germany, the creation of the European Union, the completion of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and relief aid to pre-2001 Afghanistan. The cases are diverse and historical, but they are written with an eye toward contemporary challenges and opportunities. The book closes with systematic reflections on how current diplomats can improve their activities abroad. Foreign Policy Breakthroughs offers rigorous historical insights for present policy"--

Hours after the USSR collapsed in 1991, the U.S. Congress began making plans to establish the official memory of the Cold War. Conservatives dominated the proceedings, spending millions of dollars to portray the conflict as a clash of good vs. evil, ending in a defeat of totalitarianism equal in significance to the outcome of World War II. In this book, the author visits Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials across the United States to find out how the era is remembered today. His journey provides a history of the Cold War that turns many conventional notions on their heads

The 2000 presidential left the world standing still, but it was no fluke. America is divided right down the middle - the product of a half-century, unique in our country's history, of inconclusive, increasingly heated partisan battle. Tantalizingly close to victory, each party inflames and mobilizes its most loyal supporters and battles to gain even a small edge with some contested groups. Politics has become culture war - a fight about values, faith, the family, how people should live their lives. The result: partisans are more partisan, politics more polarized, America more divided. The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It tells the history of each party's failed efforts to dominate the era's politics and ideas, radically changing the political landscape. The book provides an in-depth guide to the new groups at the center of our politics. Internationally renowned political strategist and pollster Stanley Greenberg puts the reader in the room with the strategists and politicians and shows how each party can win, even shatter the impasse. The Two Americas is a political primer and strategic playbook for this unique era - essential reading for any armchair political strategist or engaged citizen eager to understand our future politics.

"The 2000 presidential left the world standing still, but it was no fluke. America is divided right down the middle - the product of a half-century, unique in our country's history, of inconclusive, increasingly heated partisan battle. Tantalizingly close to victory, each party inflames and mobilizes its most loyal supporters and battles to gain even a small edge with some contested groups. Politics has become culture war - a fight about values, faith, the family, how people should live their lives. The result: partisans are more partisan, politics more polarized, America more divided. This book tells the history of each party's failed efforts to dominate the era's politics and ideas, radically changing the political landscape and provides an in-depth guide to the new groups at the center of our politics"--

"Theodore Draper is one of the two or three most cogent and thoughtful social historians in the United States today. Everything he writes merits close attention." -Irving Howe "Theodore Draper is a historian of today's world in a class by himself-formidably equipped with learning and experience, fearless in attacking the naivet of the left and the cruelty of the right." -Alfred Kazin Theodore Draper is one of America's most trenchant and informed critics. A Present of Things Past gathers together ten of his most recent and most powerful selected essays, in which Draper, with his customary acuity and wit, tackles a host of issues that define America's political culture. A Present of Things Past is concerned with a reexamination of the Second World War in both its military and its political aspects; the trajectory of American conservatism as it manifested itself during the Reagan years; the rise of Gorbachev and the history of "reform" in the Soviet Union; the revisionist debate over the origins and history of American communism; and the persistent mystery of a man named Max Eitingon, who was, depending on one's reading of the sources, either an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis or an agent of the Soviet secret police, or both. In "American Hubris," Draper illuminates the assumptions that have guided American foreign policy in the postwar period, and concludes that our costly misadventures-in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and elsewhere-cannot be considered a string of aberrations. They were, he argues, a consequence of the Truman Doctrine. In "Reagan's Junta," Draper observes: "This is supposed to have been the era of the imperial presidency. It has turned out to be the era of presidencies that have tried to make themselves imperial-and failed." Throughout these compelling essays, Draper demonstrates the uses and abuses to which history has been put by ideologues of both the left and the right. He finds unacceptable, for example, the practice of many journalists of fictionalizing their sources. The New York Times has called Draper "one of the clearer-eyed observers of the issues that torment us." A Present of Things Past enhances that reputation. Theodore Draper is the author of numerous books, including Present History: On Nuclear War, Dtente & Other Controversies and American Communism. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and lives in Princeton, New Jersey. "Is especially recommended for students of political science, the Cold War era, and twentieth century American history as a powerful, thought-provoking view of the people and events that shaped nations, and through nations the world."-- Library Bookwatch

Book by Kolko, Gabriel

In addition to producing much other literature, Marxist economist Perlo (1912-99) wrote more than 3,000 People vs. Profits columns over 39 years for the Communist Party paper People's Weekly World . Survivors and colleagues reprint a selection based on their portrayal of conditions at the time. Presumably a second volume will consider foreign matters. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)