A probing, ultimately critical dual biography of the Boston Brahmin brothers who helped plunge America into the Vietnam quagmire as members of the JFK-LBJ —best and brightest.— Bred to esteem public service by father Harvey (an assistant to Henry Stimson in the Hoover and FDR administrations), William and McGeorge Bundy seemed natural choices when John Kennedy appointed them, respectively, assistant secretary of defense and national security adviser. In the 1950s these policy intellectuals had displayed coolness during McCarthyite witch hunts—William as staff director of the CIA’s Office of National Estimates, McGeorge as dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences. But, Bird (co-editor with Lawrence Lifschultz of Hiroshima’s Shadow, p. 543, etc.) emphasizes, these gifted, charming men also epitomized the “vital center” that was as confident of projecting liberalism abroad as it was of upholding it at home. Bird’s predilection for New Left/revisionist history inclines him to view American power as provocative toward communism during this period (e.g., he sees JFK’s management of the Cuban missile crisis as less a triumph of cool thinking than a lucky escape from the consequences of assassination plots against Fidel Castro following the Bay of Pigs). At times, the Bundys seemed less governed by the lessons of Munich than by a politically pragmatic fear of what McGeorge called “the wild men in the wings” (i.e., conservative Republicans). The Bundys, Bird reveals with the help of a wealth of declassified documents and interviews, realized the dangers of deep American involvement in Vietnam from the start. But their sense of loyalty to Lyndon Johnson caused them not only to stay silent publicly but even to mute their dissent privately with him, thereby doing a disservice to boss and country, Bird suggests. Though somewhat biased toward a leftist view of American foreign policy, this biography scrupulously and compellingly details how two pillars of the American establishment struggled, often unsuccessfully, to balance conscience against power in the nuclear age.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80970-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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