Truman Administration Research Articles

Presidential War Powers, the Take Care Clause, and Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter

In directing the use of military force without prior congressional authorization, Presidents invoke their authority as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. Examples of such uses of force include the missile strikes directed by President Trump against the Syrian government in 2017 and 2018. Yet Article II of the Constitution is not only a source of presidential war powers, it also imposes constraints on those same powers. Article II, Section 3 requires that the President “Take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The “Laws” encompass treaties, including the U.N. Charter, which sharply restricts the use of force by States. This Article argues that by virtue of the Take Care Clause, Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter binds the President as a matter of domestic law. In substantiating this proposition, this Article relies primarily upon the arguments of the Executive Branch itself in three superficially distinct, though interrelated domains. I demonstrate that the U.S. officials and experts involved in the drafting of the U.N. Charter as well as the senators who provided their advice and consent to the treaty shared an understanding that the Charter would be a “Law” within the meaning of the Take Care Clause. I then show how the President’s duty to execute the Charter was a key element of the Truman Administration’s constitutional justification for directing the Korean “police action” in the absence of prior congressional authorization. By synthesizing Executive Branch views on war powers, the Take Care Clause, and Article 2(4), this Article shows how Presidential arguments advancing claims of authority also delineate the scope of the corresponding constitutional duties. The Article also rebuts a 1989 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum by now-Attorney General William Barr which concluded that the President may unilaterally “override” Article 2(4) because the treaty provision is non-self-executing and because the use of force is a “political question.” I explain that though the doctrines of non-self-execution and political question may be relevant to the justiciability of Article 2(4) in the courts, neither has any bearing upon the status of Article 2(4) as a “Law” which the President is obligated to faithfully execute. The conclusion that Article 2(4) is a “Law” has significant implications for the allocation of war powers. Contrary to Barr’s 1989 memo, by virtue of the later-in-time rule, it is Congress, not the President that possesses the authority to “override” this treaty provision.

Constant Full Employment Growth: The Economic Analysis and Policies of Leon Hirsch Keyserling, Council of Economic Advisors – The Truman Era and Beyond

This article discusses the generalized economic theories and policy prescriptions of Leon Hirsch Keyserling. Keyserling himself was a major author of the Employment Act of 1946, which created the Council of Economic Advisors. He became a member of the first council and later the second chair of the council, both during the Truman presidency. Keyserling also openly criticized the now-famous “Accord” of 1951-1952 between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Examination of his work and service links Keyserling’s later 16 economic policies to his goal of “constant full employment growth.” JEL Classifications: E21, E31, E40, E51, N12

Hispanidad and the Hollywood ambassador: friendship, kinship and the rearticulation of Spanish national identity before the pact of Madrid

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that the discourse of friendship in public diplomacy surrounding the figure of US Ambassador Stanton Griffis during his tenure in Spain in 1951–1952 circulated in the Spanish national imaginary to construct a more favorable popular image of the United States. Though the ideological positions guiding the Truman presidency and the Franco regime differed drastically, positive affect under the guise of friendship circulated via the media spectacle surrounding Griffis’s image – thus fostering a sense of Griffis as a friend not only to the regime but also to individual Spaniards. Using articles drawn from the Spanish press, as well as letters found in the Stanton Griffis Papers at the Truman Library Institute, I will show how objects of the specific Spanish national pride promoted by the Franco regime – such as Catholicism and anti-Communism, brotherhood and even bullfighting – “stuck” to Griffis’s image via the use of affectively “sticky” words, such as kindness and sympathy, shared values, friendship itself and even family. This analysis reveals the flexibility of Franquista ideology and contributes to a deeper understanding of the discursive realignment towards the United States that occurred under the Franco regime in the years preceding the Pact of Madrid.

Американська історіографія соціальної політики адміністрацій Ф. Д. Рузвельта та Г. Трумена (1933 – 1952 рр.)

Американська історіографія соціальної політики адміністрацій Ф. Д. Рузвельта та Г. Трумена (1933 – 1952 рр.)

Turning Korea Around: An Analysis of Mission Command at Chipyong-Ni

The Korean war, famously euphemized by president Truman as a “police action,” was a near-miss military endeavor for America and the allied forces characterized by international threat, high body counts and unexpected reversals on the battlefield. Military strategy in Korea began with the failed task force smith at Suwon, a movement gen Douglas MacArthur later admitted being an “arrogant display of strength.” Indeed, although Americans had been conditioned by Wii to mount large-scale combat to complete victory, the Truman administration had made significant cuts to defense spending and it was clear early on that the situation in Korea required a new strategy. The U.S. lost 6,000 soldiers in the first few months of the war; south Korean casualties neared 70,000. By September 1950, the tide had changed and American military action, driven mainly by amphibious attack, had succeeded in the steady seizure of Suwon via inch ‘on, resulting in the recapture of Seoul. But not more than two months later an “entirely new war” had emerged with the influx of more than 300,000 Chinese combat troops to aid Kim ill sung and the soviet forces in north Korea. It was a bitter winter for the allies in Korea. Were it not for the exemplary leadership at the battle of chipyong-ni in mid-February 1951, the communist Chinese forces (CCF) would have continued their strong drive into south Korea and the war may well have been lost. Col Paul freeman, commander of the 23rd regimental combat team (RCT), clearly met gen George c. Marshall’s definition of strong leadership and put into action the mission command principles that lead to successful mission completion at chipyong-ni. This battle was truly a major turning point for the U.S. and changed the way we fought future battles.

President Truman’s Justice Department and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Supreme Court

President Truman’s Justice Department and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Supreme Court IAN B. FAGELSON Introduction 2017 marked the seventieth anniversary ofan important landmark in the history ofthe Supreme Court. Although the Court’s deci­ sions in the Brown cases1 that destroyed the legal foundations of state-sanctioned racial discrimination were handed down during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Presidency, much of the groundwork was laid on President Harry S. Truman’s watch. Faced with an unhelpful Congress, Truman’s contributions to civil rights were effectively confined to the bully pulpit (as witness, his speech to the NAACP at the Lincoln Memorial)2 and executive actions (such as establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and endorsing its recommendations;3 desegregat­ ing the federal government4 and the mili­ tary).5 Even before he pledged support for civil rights at the Lincoln Memorial in June 1947, he engaged with Attorney General Tom C. Clark on how to combat the rise in Southern white terrorism and committed his Justice Department to tackling lynching.6 Moreover, on December 5, 1947, the Justice Department broke with tradition by interven­ ing7 for the first time in a case between private litigants where no concrete federal interest such as the interpretation of a U.S. statute was involved.8 At issue was the enforceabil­ ity of racially restrictive housing covenants. Between 1947 and 1952, Truman’s Justice Department participated five times, via written briefs and oral arguments, in private lawsuits urging the outlawing of segregation. The cases concerned housing,9 transporta­ tion,10 public accommodations,11 higher education,12 and, most controversially, ele­ mentary and high schools in Brown itself. In each case, the Supreme Court ruled unani­ mously in favor of the position argued by the 70 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Justice Department. However, there is little direct evidence of Truman’s personal in­ volvement in the Department’s actions. Whether the Department’s actions were true instances of Truman administration policy, rather than the work of liberal civil service lawyers in which the top level of the administration merely acquiesced, has been the subject of debate, as has the question of what considerations drove the interven­ tions. This article demonstrates that the story is more complicated than many scholars have suggested. After a brief literature survey and a description of the unique status of the Solicitor General, a study of each case in its historical context reveals that the level of engagement of the President and cabinet-level officials and the considerations that motivated them were not uniform throughout the period. None­ theless, the Department’s interventions must be regarded as acts of administration policy for which the President deserves considerable credit. Literature Survey Some scholars write on the basis of unstated assumptions as to whether the Justice Department acted at Truman’s behest.13 Michael Gardner, without citing hard evidence, asserts that Truman personally caused the Justice Department to act.14 According to Richard Dalfiume, Truman “allowed” the Justice Department to inter­ vene.15 William Berman claims, without citing evidence, that Truman did not autho­ rise, or even know about, several of the briefs.16 However, again without citing evidence, he also asserts that Truman person­ ally authorised the Department’s first inter­ vention in 1947.17 Barton Bernstein views the briefs as primarily the work of Justice Department lawyers in which the administra­ tion acquiesced and says that it is unclear whether Truman was “an enthusiastic supporter or a reluctant endorser of placing the Federal government on the side of civil rights in these cases.”18 In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy,19 Mary Dudziak devotes an extended endnote to the question, concluding that the briefs should be viewed as an important part of Truman’s civil rights program and as “consciously adopted Truman administration policy.”20 The question of the extent (if any) of Truman’s personal involvement with the interventions is intertwined with controversy over Truman’s motivation for supporting civil rights. At one extreme, Richard Dalfiume and Michael Gardner see Truman’s commitment to civil rights as driven primar­ ily by moral convictions.21 At the other extreme, William...

The Legacy of Genetic Analysis Advances Contemporary Research with Escherichia coli K-12 and Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium LT2.

Escherichia coli K-12 and Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium LT2 became standard organisms for genetic analysis during the Truman administration. Half a century later, genetic analysis with these strains had become an art form, interpreted through 23 articles in the ambitious two-volume masterpiece edited by the late Fred Neidhardt and colleagues. These legacy articles now are available through EcoSal Plus, so as to inform and inspire contemporary genetic analyses in these standard organisms and their relatives.

Slouching towards Jerusalem: The Truman Administration and the Palestine Question

Although the amount of blood shed in the Arab-Israeli conflict has gradually declined during the past seventy years, the amount of scholarly ink spilled on the creation of Israel continues to rise. Irene Gendzier, a political scientist at Boston University who earlier authored a splendid biography of Frantz Fanon and a provocative analysis of American intervention in Lebanon, offers a revisionist account of Harry Truman’s policies toward Palestine. She concludes that, as early as 1948, Washington made a cynical decision to sacrifice Palestinian rights at the altar of Persian Gulf crude, with Israel regarded as a “strategic asset,” not as a diplomatic liability. “The choice facing policymakers was not oil versus Israel but rather oil and Israel,” Gendzier insists in her introduction. “In the years that followed, it was oil and Israel versus reform and revolution in the Arab world” (xviii). To make her case, Gendzier covers a great deal of well-traveled ground, recapping Truman’s shock when the Nazi death camps were liberated in 1945, his frustration with British diplomats and State Department bureaucrats during the battles over “trusteeship versus partition” in 1946 and 1947, and his susceptibility to pro-Zionist arguments delivered by members of his inner circle in 1948. Relying mainly on published material from the State Department’s Foreign Relations series and the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Documents on Foreign Policy volumes, she tells her story in such intricate detail and with so much thick description that even readers already familiar with the trajectory of American policy will feel their eyes begin to glaze over. Indeed, by the final chapters, I found myself skimming through Gendzier’s five-hundred-word quotations from policy planning documents and wishing that her book had included a bibliography listing all her sources in one place. Yet if one reads her introduction, her synopses of each of the book’s five sections (1, 55, 113–14, 181, and 241), and her conclusion, Gendzier’s overall argument emerges in sharper focus, and her two most important findings become crystal clear.

Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community during the Great Depression, The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class

Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community during the Great Depression, The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class

Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, by Daniel Macfarlane

Reviewed by: Ronald Stagg, Ryerson UniversitySurely one of the longest negotiations between Canada and the United States must be that involving navigation of the Great Lakes, and in particular the St. Lawrence River. Beginning in the 1890s, both the Canadian Parliament and American House of Representatives requested improved navigation on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence route. Negotiations dragged on for over half a century, with each country taking turns being the reluctant partner. Only twice in the intervening years was an agreement close, in 1932 when a change of government in the United States doomed a signed agreement, and in 1941 when the entry of the United States into the Second World War frustrated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's attempt to carry a measure through Congress.Previous works on the history of the Seaway, from Carleton Mabee's 1961 The Seaway Story to this reviewer's 2010 volume, The Golden Dream: A History of the St. Lawrence Seaway, have covered these negotiations in great detail, with each addressing somewhat different material. Macfarlane has chosen a different approach, summarizing these protracted negotiations in two short but effective chapters and then concentrating on the few years leading up to the signing of the treaty in 1954. To this he has added his take on the building of the St. Lawrence canals and power project, in what could be termed a technological and environmental history, and some comments on the operation of the canal since its completion.Macfarlane's distinctive contribution to the history of negotiations is his in-depth look at the position of the Canadian government on building an all-Canadian system. There has been speculation about whether the Canadian government became frustrated with the time it took the American government to approve the plan and decided to go it alone, or was bluffing to put pressure on the Americans. Macfarlane makes a strong case for the former. By 1952, the Canadian government informed President Harry Truman that, given the difficulties the Truman administration was having in getting approval for a revamped 1941 agreement, Canada was prepared to go it alone in building a new canal system in the St. Lawrence, with strong support from the Canadian public. This much was already public knowledge. The author goes on to explain that, until the American Federal Power Commission approved New York State as the entity responsible for developing the American half of the power project, and all appeals of the decision were exhausted, Canada could not act, even though the power project was considered vital to the future growth of Ontario. By the time this occurred in early 1954 both branches of Congress were discussing new schemes for a joint development, so the Canadian Cabinet decided to wait rather than pursue the all-Canadian plan and possibly offend the Americans. This suggests that there had never been a firm determination in Cabinet for Canada to act alone, but Macfarlane sees the decision as the abandonment of an all-Canadian policy in order to maintain good relations with Canada's wartime ally and trading partner, a point he elaborates upon in his conclusion. …

ГРУППЫ ИНТЕРЕСОВ И АМЕРИКАНСКАЯ ВНЕШНЯЯ ПОМОЩЬ В ПЕРИОД АДМИНИСТРАЦИИ Г. ТРУМЭНА

ГРУППЫ ИНТЕРЕСОВ И АМЕРИКАНСКАЯ ВНЕШНЯЯ ПОМОЩЬ В ПЕРИОД АДМИНИСТРАЦИИ Г. ТРУМЭНА

Transforming Violence into a Focusing Event: A Reception Study of the 1946 Georgia Lynching

Abstract Scholars have repeatedly argued that Harry Truman’s decision to create the President’s Committee on Civil Rights would ultimately influence civil rights in the United States for many years afterward. However, scholars have been less clear in explaining what led Truman to act on civil rights in the first place. One important factor in the Truman administration’s creation of the committee that is often mentioned but almost never given as much attention as it deserves is the 1946 Georgia Lynching. Through a reception study of the articles, congressional debates, editorials, and speeches that responded to the murders, this essay argues that the murders of four African Americans in a small, rural town were transformed into a national focusing event because of how several key interpretive decisions emerged from the basic facts of the lynching in conjunction with larger cultural concerns. This analysis both highlights how the mass lynching came to have cultural significance and argues for the importance of rhetorical scholarship that engages the role of focusing events in both public debate and policy creation.

A Defense of Faith

At the outset of the u.s. Occupation of Japan following the end of World War ii, the Truman administration charged General Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (scap), with the primary goals of demilitarizing and democratizing the defeated nation. MacArthur received broad authority and little oversight for his management of this project, which he in turn used to accomplish his mission as he saw fit. For his part, the general firmly held that the promotion of Christianity served the objectives of the u.s. occupation and larger Cold War aims. This essay demonstrates that MacArthur sought to use his power to make Christian proselytizing in Japan a critical part of his agenda. He repeatedly argued that a Christian-oriented Japan would keep communism from taking root in the nation and create a lasting, strong, and democratic u.s. ally in the Cold War in Asia. Religious conversion would make a significant contribution to achieving the overall goal of purging Japan of its militarism and antagonistic past and fashioning a friendly nation in the image of the United States.

A Campaign of Truth: The State Department, Propaganda, and the Olympic Games, 1950–1952

Scholars who have examined the role of the Olympic Games in U.S. Cold War strategy have dealt mostly with the post-Stalin era, when the Olympic Games were a stage for “symbolic combat” between athletes from the East and West and a cultural force with a powerful and compelling message that could be used for political gain. The Games were overseen by the International Olympic Committee, which both influenced and was influenced by the actions of world leaders and states. Although U.S. officials generally refused to approve federal funds for the national Olympic team, they took steps to manipulate the Games for propaganda purposes. The Cold War origins of such activities have not yet been clearly delineated. This article shows that Harry Truman's administration in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the first to address and to take advantage of the propaganda potential of the Olympics in the Cold War era, and this transformative period coincided with, and was driven by, the government's much expanded information offensive, the “Campaign of Truth.”

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Masuda Hajimu, and: Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Pierre Asselin

Reviewed by: Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Masuda Hajimu, and: Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Pierre Asselin Matthew Masur Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World. By Masuda Hajimu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 388pp. $39.95 (cloth). Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965. By Pierre Asselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 319pp. $55.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). If the “origins of the Cold War” is a well-trod subject for historians, Masuda Hajimu offers an innovative approach to the topic. The Cold War, he argues, was not “something that existed as an objective situation immediately following World War II.” Instead, the Cold War was an “imagined reality” that “existed . . . because people thought that it existed.” Cold War Crucible is “a history of the fantasy of the Cold War, focusing on its imagined and constructed nature as well as the social need for such an imagined reality” (p. 2). According to Masuda, the “imagined reality” of the Cold War initially took hold in the United States, East Asia, and Europe—areas that had potent recent memories of wartime experiences. (Africa and Latin America would be slower to adopt the “Cold War” construct because they tended to view international events through a postcolonial lens.) But even in areas where the “Cold War” reality took hold, it was as much a product of local conditions as it was the reflection of a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the immediate post–World War II years, the United States, Japan, and China experienced periods of intense social and political conflict. In the United States, a grass-roots conservative movement attacked groups or individuals perceived to be “un-American.” In Japan, conservatives pushed back against postwar occupation reforms intended to reshape Japanese society. In China, anger at America’s “reverse course” [End Page 343] in Japan led to growing support for the Chinese Communist Party and vocal denunciations of America’s Guomindang allies. While all of these disputes would later be identified as part of the early Cold War, Masuda sees them as outgrowths of local political and social conditions. It was not until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 that people in the United States, Japan, and China—and in other parts of the world—began to interpret domestic politics through a Cold War lens. Particularly in areas affected by World War II, people came to see the Korean War as the beginning of a new global conflict—the first salvo in World War III. In this heightened atmosphere, the political differences that had emerged after 1945 intensified and hardened. Moreover, political and social conflicts took on a distinctly “Cold War” cast, reflecting the growing perception of a global conflict between communism and capitalism. The Korean War has long been understood as a key event in the hardening of American and Chinese Cold War policies. Masuda echoes this view, though he explains the relationship differently. In both the United States and China, common people reacting to the conflict in Korea pressured their governments to respond firmly. On the American side, Masuda argues that public opinion influenced the Truman administration’s decisions to cross the 38th parallel and to adopt NSC-68. On the Chinese side, the Chinese Communist Party similarly responded to growing public pressure to intervene in the conflict on the Korean peninsula. Both cases illustrate “the encroachment of the social into the sphere of high politics” (p. 143). They also show that “the Cold War was not necessarily a product created through policymakers’ conduct and misconduct; numerous nameless people were, more or less, also participants in the making of such a world” (p. 144). Cold War Crucible concludes with a section describing the suppression of dissent—often violently—during the Korean War. In Korea itself, massacres of civilians were perpetrated under the guise of eliminating Communists or class enemies. Masuda suggests that a similar dynamic was at work elsewhere: at roughly the same time, “China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries; Taiwan implemented the White Terror; the Philippines suppressed ‘un- Filipino’ activities; Japan conducted its...

Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006, paper 2015. 142 pp. $19.95

First published in 2006 and now reissued in a paperback edition, this useful book, well suited for classroom use, gives us both less and more than its title implies. A collection of Robert Ferrell’s reflections on the Truman administration published from 1972 to 2002, it takes its name from an initial chapter on Cold War revisionists, then segues to chapters on the nuclear bomb, the early Cold War, Korea, and the historiography on Harry S. Truman. Ferrell’s critique of the revisionists is restrained and gentlemanly. He calls the father of the genre, University of Wisconsin historian William Appleman Williams, a friend. He shrinks from describing as Marxist the far-fetched assertion by Williams that the central theme of U.S. foreign policy was a perpetual quest for “Open Door” markets. Indeed Ferrell almost seems to buy Williams’s implausible declaration that the Open Door interpretation was simply an adaptation of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to the wider world of diplomatic history. In reality it was much more akin to Karl Marx’s interpretation of the dynamics of capitalism than Turner’s evocation of pioneers moving toward the setting sun. Ferrell admits as much by describing Williams, Lloyd Gardner, and other revisionists as “socialists.” By the time he gets around to Gabriel Kolko he finds it impossible to avoid “Marxist” (p. 13). The “C-word” never makes the text, although Ronald Radosh’s autobiographical work, Commies, makes clear that a strong, covert Communist allegiance was central to the upbringing of at least some Cold War revisionists, sometimes characterized as “red diaper babies.” Two chapters on post-World War II U.S. foreign relations—“Diplomacy without Armaments” and “NATO”—are rewarding. In sharp, concise prose, Ferrell describes a diplomatic world in which the United States, with conventional military forces that could accurately be described as impotent, successfully contained Soviet expansionism. What Ferrell does not do—it likely would require a separate article—is explain why the Soviet Army did not simply march into Western Europe. The U.S. nuclear monopoly in the years immediately after the war no doubt had a lot to do with Soviet restraint, even if Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov might protest that his government was not impressed with the bomb. The USSR, moreover, needed to recover from the appalling wartime devastation, including the deaths of some 26 million, widespread destruction, and huge population dislocations. Having to pursue a rough equivalent of the Marshall Plan for his own country, Iosif Stalin moved with deliberation to consolidate his grip on territories the Red Army had occupied by the end of the war. The United States,

Southern Politics Revisited: On V. O. Key's “South in the House”

V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation continues to be a central text in political science, the single most important work in understanding the role of the South in American politics. This article returns to, replicates, and seeks to advance Key's analysis of southern politics in Congress, reanalyzing and extending his account of southern strategies and actions in the House of Representatives. Where Key's text was characterized by an episodic attention to issue substance, we focus directly on how southern representation varied across discrete issue areas. We generate temporally fine-grained issue-specific ideal points for members of Congress that allow us to determine how congressional preferences changed across time, generating a more refined portrait of the process by which southern Democratic members diverged from their northern counterparts. We also thicken and extend Key's account along regional and temporal dimensions, assessing how his findings change when we employ a legal-institutional definition of the South, and include the whole period from the beginning of the New Deal to the close of the Truman administration. The article concludes by detailing the significance of our finding to the study of American politics, particularly American political development.

Doomed from the Start? Ngo Dinh Diem and the Start of the Vietnam War

It is often said there were three critical junctures when the United States could have altered the course of events in Vietnam: l) in 1945/46 when OSS agents established a rapport with Ho Chi Minh, with the prospect of a more moderate policy toward French Indochina on the part of the Truman administration; 2) the 1954 Geneva Agreements and the failure to abide by the provision for elections in 1956; 3) the Buddhist crisis of 1963 which exposed the profound weakness of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime and offered JFK and then LBJ a chance to consider an alternative to the escalation of the war. Jessica Chapman considers the second. By and large she agrees with established accounts that the United States was blinded by Cold War politics to the fatal weaknesses of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, which was revealed early on by his handling of the so-called sect crisis. The Viet Minh in the south, bound by the 1954 Geneva Accords, had either regrouped to the north or were lying low. The sect crisis of 1955 laid bare the basic nature of the Diem regime – ruthless suppression of “enemies”, failure to even consider compromise with non-Communist opponents, and window dressing in the form of ideological democratic cum modernist propaganda. Although the United States initially considered abandoning Diem at that point, he was able, with CIA-furnished bribes and cunning, to stage an armed showdown against the sects (the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, and the Binh Xuyen) in an incident known as the “battle of Saigon”. He then rigged a “plebiscite” to take power from Bao Dai (still the French-derived legal authority, pending elections), and subsequently declared himself President of a new Republic of Vietnam in 1956.

Perkembangan Lobi Yahudi dan Pengaruhnya terhadap Politik Luar Negeri dan Kongres Amerika Serikat

United States' foreign policy has been extremely influenced by some determinant factors both personal and institutional. However, by the end of World War II, an institution known as interest group, played important role relatively to the determination of United States' foreign policies, particularly those which were related to Middle East conflict. A Jewish lobby known as AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) has been the most powerful interest group to influence the United States' foreign policy especially after President Truman's administration. This article describes the internal development of AIPAC and some AIPAC's actions in order to get public supports to influence the decision makers.

Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway by Daniel Macfarlane

Reviewed by: Ronald Stagg, Ryerson UniversitySurely one of the longest negotiations between Canada and the United States must be that involving navigation of the Great Lakes, and in particular the St. Lawrence River. Beginning in the 1890s, both the Canadian Parliament and American House of Representatives requested improved navigation on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence route. Negotiations dragged on for over half a century, with each country taking turns being the reluctant partner. Only twice in the intervening years was an agreement close, in 1932 when a change of government in the United States doomed a signed agreement, and in 1941 when the entry of the United States into the Second World War frustrated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's attempt to carry a measure through Congress.Previous works on the history of the Seaway, from Carleton Mabee's 1961 The Seaway Story to this reviewer's 2010 volume, The Golden Dream: A History of the St. Lawrence Seaway, have covered these negotiations in great detail, with each addressing somewhat different material. Macfarlane has chosen a different approach, summarizing these protracted negotiations in two short but effective chapters and then concentrating on the few years leading up to the signing of the treaty in 1954. To this he has added his take on the building of the St. Lawrence canals and power project, in what could be termed a technological and environmental history, and some comments on the operation of the canal since its completion.Macfarlane's distinctive contribution to the history of negotiations is his in-depth look at the position of the Canadian government on building an all-Canadian system. There has been speculation about whether the Canadian government became frustrated with the time it took the American government to approve the plan and decided to go it alone, or was bluffing to put pressure on the Americans. Macfarlane makes a strong case for the former. By 1952, the Canadian government informed President Harry Truman that, given the difficulties the Truman administration was having in getting approval for a revamped 1941 agreement, Canada was prepared to go it alone in building a new canal system in the St. Lawrence, with strong support from the Canadian public. This much was already public knowledge. The author goes on to explain that, until the American Federal Power Commission approved New York State as the entity responsible for developing the American half of the power project, and all appeals of the decision were exhausted, Canada could not act, even though the power project was considered vital to the future growth of Ontario. By the time this occurred in early 1954 both branches of Congress were discussing new schemes for a joint development, so the Canadian Cabinet decided to wait rather than pursue the all-Canadian plan and possibly offend the Americans. This suggests that there had never been a firm determination in Cabinet for Canada to act alone, but Macfarlane sees the decision as the abandonment of an all-Canadian policy in order to maintain good relations with Canada's wartime ally and trading partner, a point he elaborates upon in his conclusion. …