Complicating the Nixon Story

The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952–1961 by Irwin F. Gellman. Yale University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 791 pages, $40.The historical demonization of Richard Nixon usually proceeds from his supposedly red-baiting campaigns for the House and...

Churchill Defends the Gallipoli Campaign

Winston Churchill reportedly once remarked that history would treat him kindly because he intended to write it. Churchill’s efforts to do so failed with respect to the Gallipoli Campaign—the allied attempt during the First World War to force the Dardanelles Strait,...

Rehabilitating MacArthur

The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur by Mark Perry. Basic Books, 2014. Hardcover, 380 pages, $30. Supreme Commander: MacArthur’s Triumph in Japan by Seymour Morris, Jr. Harper Collins, 2014. Hardcover, 363 pages, $27. The historical...

Meeting Stalin’s Challenge

Kennan, Lippmann, Burnham, and the Great Strategy Debate in the Early Cold War YearsDuring the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to repeated Soviet encroachments in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iran, Central Europe, and the Far East, the United States gradually...

Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Coming of the First World War

The American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan called the First World War the “seminal catastrophe of [the twentieth] century.” Between 1914 and 1918, the major powers of Western civilization waged brutal and unrelenting war against each other, resulting in the...