Dennis J. Dunn. Caught Between Roosevelt & Stalin: America's Ambassadors to Moscow. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. xii + 349 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-2023-2.
Reviewed by Laura A. Belmonte (Oklahoma State University)
Published on H-Pol (March, 1999)
Reassessing Roosevelt
For over fifty years, historians have debated the legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While many scholars praise Roosevelt's domestic policies,[1] analyses of FDR's foreign policies are less laudatory. As early as 1947, journalists and former FDR advisors assailed Roosevelt's naivety in failing to counter Soviet expansionism.[2] Through the late 1960s, Cold War political realities compelled even defenders of FDR's wartime diplomacy to criticize his dealings with Soviet premier Josef Stalin.[3] In the past twenty years, more nuanced interpretations of Roosevelt's political principles and foreign policies have appeared. While still critical of Roosevelt's accommodation of the Soviets, these works stress the enormous domestic and international constraints impeding FDR's diplomatic and strategic initiatives.[4]
Despite this abundant literature, no consensus on Roosevelt's foreign policy has emerged. In the late 1980s, Frederick Marks and Robert Nisbet released scathing critiques of Roosevelt's character and attempts to cooperation with the Soviet Union.[5] Recently-released documents from the former USSR have only complicated scholarly disputes about FDR. While critical of Roosevelt's policies in Central and Eastern Europe, Edward Bennett praises FDR for defeating fascism and laying the groundwork for an enduring postwar peace. Remi Nadeau and Amos Perlmutter, however, use similar Soviet sources to blast Roosevelt for submitting to the ruthless Stalin and consigning millions to decades of repression.[6]
Dennis J. Dunn's Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin: America's Ambassadors to Moscow continues this assault on Roosevelt's diplomacy. Dunn, a professor of history at Southwest Texas State University, has drawn upon Soviet, British, and American sources to produce a well-written account of Roosevelt's policies toward the Soviet Union and his relationships with U.S. diplomatic envoys in Moscow.[7] While Dunn's treatments of Eastern European politics, wartime conferences, and American diplomats are thoughtful and persuasive, his analysis of FDR is often unfair. Careless use of secondary literature, unsupported claims, and omissions of newer approaches to foreign policy also weaken Dunn's argument. Throughout the text, Dunn views Roosevelt's policies through the prism of the Cold War rather than assessing them within their own historical context.
The book is organized into five parts. Each section examines the relationship between Roosevelt and an American ambassador to Moscow: William Bullitt (1933-36); Joseph E. Davies (1936-38); Laurence A. Steinhardt (1939-41); William C. Standley (1942-43); and W. Averell Harriman (1943-1946). Dunn also includes material on chief diplomatic advisors including George F. Kennan, Loy Henderson, Charles Bohlen, and Philip Faymonville. In the preface, Dunn briefly surveys the historiography on FDR's foreign policy. He disputes notions that Roosevelt's deteriorating health prompted him to appease Stalin. He challenges those who argue that the imperative of defeating Nazi Germany overshadowed America's wartime relationship with the USSR. Dismissing the idea that Roosevelt was merely naive, Dunn asserts that FDR actively and consciously courted the "evil" Stalin (pp. ix-x).
Dunn accords special significance to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Ambassadors in this post, Dunn claims, did far more than their colleagues elsewhere. Their "stature and independence of mind allowed them to go beyond policy execution and political reporting to actually affect [sic] policy ..." (p. xi). The implication is that other ambassadors achieved little--an assertion belied by the experiences of Josephus Daniels and Sumner Welles, among others. FDR's ambassadors to Mexico and Cuba respectively, both Daniels and Welles instituted substantial changes in their predecessors' policies.
By focusing mainly on ambassadors, Dunn obscures the importance of other participants in foreign relations. He does not examine the role of mid-level bureaucrats in the implementation of foreign policy.[8] In addition to distorting the relative importance of U.S. high-level diplomats in Moscow, Dunn also excludes the perspectives of other Americans who visited Stalinist Russia (p. xiii). One gains no sense of how U.S. journalists, workers, businesspeople, or tourists viewed the USSR. Did the impressions of these individuals differ from those of the American diplomatic core? Did their opinions affect U.S. foreign policy? Dunn leaves such questions unanswered.[9]
Dunn frames his analysis with a clash between "Rooseveltians" and "Traditionalists." Rooseveltians accepted Wilsonian tenets of democracy, human rights, self-determination, and collective security, but they "added a revolutionary and paradoxical twist to Wilsonianism when dealing with the Soviet Union." Adopting the "pseudoprofound theory of convergence," Rooseveltians claimed that the Soviet Union "was moving ineluctably toward democracy" (pp. 3-4). The author alleges that "moral relativism" prompted Roosevelt to mislead the American public and ignore his foreign policy advisors in order to prove that Stalin was an evolving democrat, not "a genocidal megalomaniac guided by the higher power of revolutionary inevitability ..." (p. 4, 6).
In contrast, "Traditionalists" rejected the theory of convergence. Although they shared Roosevelt's hope of improved U.S.-Soviet relations, they viewed Stalin as "a murderer, a liar, and a vicious opponent of the United States and of pluralism generally." Imbued with "absolute morality," Traditionalists wanted Roosevelt to compel the Soviets to adopt democracy and "the minimum standards of moral behavior that were outlined in the world's principal religions and moral codes." These pleas, however, went unheeded as Roosevelt remained intent on pursuing "his policy of uncritical friendship toward Stalin" (pp. 8-9).
Such Manichean constructs demonstrate the lack of subtlety marring Dunn's narrative. The book's overriding theme is that Roosevelt was immoral --a rather disturbing and inaccurate allegation that does not square with many of FDR's domestic policies. Because Dunn does not address Roosevelt's attempts to alleviate the Great Depression, one gains little sense of the esteem in which large sectors of the U.S. population held FDR. Americans who placed their portraits of Roosevelt alongside pictures of Christ will not recognize the Roosevelt portrayed here.
Dunn is on more solid ground when tracing the events in U.S.-Soviet relations. After briefly describing the aftermath of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, Dunn explores Roosevelt's decision to pursue diplomatic recognition of the USSR. In 1933, an exploratory committee recommended that America recognize the Soviet Union only if the Soviets first agreed to a number of conditions including compensation for defaulted loans and expropriated property, cessation of communist propaganda activities in the United States, and guaranteed civil and religious rights for Americans residing in the USSR. Significantly, the committee did not comment upon the Ukranian purges. But Roosevelt, hoping to foster economic opportunities and to stymie Japanese aggression, did not insist that the Soviets comply with the committee's recommendations prior to recognition. On November 16, 1933, Roosevelt established relations with the Soviet Union. He left resolution of outstanding Soviet-American conflicts to his new Moscow-based diplomats (pp. 1-37).
Dunn asserts that Roosevelt was entranced by Stalin and consistently overlooked the Soviets' abhorrent human rights violations. But even Dunn's "moral" Traditionalists engaged in this myopia. The author does not explore the fact that the committee overlooking the Ukranian purges included Robert Kelley, the head of the State Department's East European Division. The notoriously anti-Soviet Kelley trained most of the "Traditionalist" Soviet specialists for whom Dunn evinces such admiration. Kelley's apparent willingness to overlook the Stalinist purges suggests that Roosevelt was not alone in placing political expediency over morality.[10] William C. Bullitt, America's first ambassador to Moscow, shared Roosevelt's belief in an imminent Soviet democracy. In 1934, Bullitt and his new staff hoped to resolve quickly conflicts over debts, housing for diplomats, money exchanges, and restrictions on air travel. But the Soviets rudely dismissed Bullitt's overtures. Dumbfounded, Bullitt searched for explanations and finally blamed Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. Dunn writes, "Bullitt suspected that Litvinov's Jewishness made him obstinate. He similarly viewed the head of press relations for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Constantine Oumansky, who was also Jewish and who eventually took Alexander Troyanovsky's place as Soviet ambassador in Washington in 1939" (p. 43).
Lest one get the impression that only Americans voiced anti-Semitic complaints, Dunn later includes a Soviet evaluation of U.S. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt as "a wealthy, bourgeoisie Jew ... permeated with the foul smell of Zionism" (p. 107). Racism also factored into U.S.-Soviet relations. Remarking upon the "Oriental" racial makeup of the Soviet authorities, Steinhardt wrote, "They are utterly indifferent to outside opinion and do not follow the lines of reasoning of the west. Their standards of ethics are diametrically the opposite of those which prevail in occidental countries. As a result it is impossible to deal with them as one would deal with westerners (p. 106).
Amazingly, Dunn does not analyze these provocative statements. Throughout the text, he consistently fails to assess how cultural assumptions and distortions affected American-Soviet relations. One is left wondering how factors of race, gender, religion, and culture influenced U.S. perceptions of the Soviets. Dunn also could have examined the provincialism imbued in the ambassadors' assumption that they could recreate their comfortable American lifestyles in the USSR. Incorporation of material on cultural transmission and receptivity would have greatly enriched Dunn's work.[11]
Politics, not culture, remains Dunn's focus. After the resumption of the purges in 1935 and the announcement of the Popular Front strategy, Bullitt grew disillusioned with the Soviet system. Convinced that cooperation with Stalin was now impossible, Bullitt pushed Roosevelt to adopt a quid pro quo attitude toward the Soviets. When Roosevelt ignored his pleas, Bullitt resigned and never returned to the Soviet Union (pp. 48-58).
Roosevelt found Joseph E. Davies, Bullitt's successor, a much more suitable envoy to the Soviets. Dunn nicely evokes the Soviets' perceptions of Davies and his wealthy wife Marjorie Merriweather Post Davies, the heiress to the General Foods fortune. "For the Soviet leaders Davies and his rich wife were quintessential capitalists-- greedy, hypocritical, narcissistic, indifferent to human suffering and need inclined to measure life by ledgers, and, above all, naive about the revolutionary direction of society" (p. 62). Dunn is much more successful in portraying how class and political differences influenced Soviet-American relations than he is examining race, gender, culture, or religion.
When Dunn describes how the Davies cruised their yacht in the Gulf of Finland, went on shopping sprees throughout Europe, and hoarded Russian art, one easily sees why the Soviets resented American diplomats. But, in Stalin's eyes, Davies's fawning attitude made up for his capitalist stupidities. For the same reason, Roosevelt admired Davies. Davies, according to Dunn, was "everything Stalin wanted in a foreign representative short of being an actual spy. He was also the perfect person from FDR's point of view" (p. 65). Determined to have diplomats who shared his positive appraisal of the Soviets, Roosevelt and Davies removed George F. Kennan from the Moscow embassy and tried to isolate the anti-Soviet contingent in the State Department (p. 68).
Such tactics did not endear Davies to the Soviet experts remaining in the Moscow embassy. Isolated, Davies relied on the pro-Soviet military aide Philip Faymonville, foreign reporters, and short-wave radio broadcasts. Determined to support Roosevelt, Davies "simply refused to criticize, challenge, or confront the Kremlin" (p. 75). He ignored police harassment of the local diplomatic community. He did not press for resolution of the debt issue and other financial conflicts. Davies and Faymonville even insisted that the purge trials were fair and justified persecutions of traitors and conspirators. Unlike Bullitt, Davies did not resign out of disgust with Stalinism. Davies departed because of his wife's displeasure at the dismal living conditions in Moscow. Davies would be the only one of FDR's ambassadors to Moscow who unconditionally supported Roosevelt's accommodating policies toward Stalin. Distracted by the rise of Hitler and convinced that U.S.-Soviet relations were in fine shape, Roosevelt spent months finding a successor for Davies. In August 1939, almost a year after Davies's resignation, Laurence A. Steinhardt reached the USSR.
Almost immediately, Steinhardt learned of the secret territorial agreements in the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Roosevelt apparently did not know that Steinhardt rejected the theory of convergence. When Steinhardt began denouncing Stalin's duplicity and the shabby treatment of the American delegation in Moscow, Roosevelt initially ignored him. With the world in crisis, the president was in no hurry to complicate his relationship with his new ambassador. But Steinhardt persisted. He complained about potholed roads, gas shortages, and police surveillance.
Throughout Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin, Dunn includes wonderful depictions of the deplorable living conditions endured by American diplomats in Moscow. These descriptions and his excellent biographical sketches of each ambassador are among the strongest elements of Dunn's book. Repeatedly, Dunn demonstrates how each ambassadorial appointee's excitement at receipt of the "prestigious" Moscow post dissipated upon grasping the realities of life in Moscow.
Steinhardt's experience reflects this trend. After receiving opened personal mail, Steinhardt began calling for the State Department to treat the Soviet delegation in Washington as poorly as the American contingent in Moscow was treated. Either oblivious to or ignoring Roosevelt's reaction to Bullitt's demand for a reciprocal American-Soviet partnership, Steinhardt began to press for a harder line against the Soviets. But the president ignored Steinhardt's demands. Even after the Soviets invaded Poland, the Baltic States, and Finland, Roosevelt's resisted demands for harsh U.S. sanctions against the USSR. As FDR embarked on a public relations blitz to sell the Soviets as proto-democrats, Steinhardt lost influence. In November 1941, he resigned.
William H. Standley, Steinhardt's successor, attempted to resolve conflicts over Lend-Lease aid, to obtain the release of American pilots who landed in Siberia after bombing Japan, and to improve the exchange of military and technical information between the Americans and the Soviets. Movement of the seat of government to Kuibyshev, an isolated city 500 miles east of Moscow, worsened the already-abysmal living conditions the diplomatic community endured. Nonetheless, Standley remained an advocate of unconditional aid to the Soviets and attempted to make headway on unresolved issues (pp. 150-56).
Following American entry into the war, Standley found himself stonewalled by both the Soviets and Roosevelt. Lend-Lease aid proved particularly troublesome. While requesting enormous amounts of equipment, the Soviets refused to provide information about its use. The U.S. supervisor of the Soviet Lend-Lease program, Colonel Faymonville, did not help matters by freely sharing intelligence with the Soviets. Unable to control either the Soviets or Faymonville, Standley lashed out publicly. On March 8, 1943, Standley told reporters of his irritation at the ingratitude shown by the Soviets for Lend-Lease materiel and private relief aid. He blasted the Soviets for creating the impression that they were fighting alone and without foreign assistance. He also criticized the Soviets' continued refusal to share military information. The State Department finally removed the irritating Faymonville and the Soviets publicly acknowledged American charitable help (pp. 175-80).
Cheered by this minor victory, Standley continued pressuring the Soviets and abandoned his support of unconditional aid. He pushed for the release of the interned American pilots and called for Finnish independence. Confronted by yet another ambassador criticizing his policies toward the USSR, Roosevelt dispatched the always reliable Davies to Moscow. Disgusted, Standley resigned.
W. Averell Harriman also found the role of U.S. Ambassador to the USSR a trying one. Harriman proved unable to persuade Stalin to meet privately with FDR. He watched in dismay as the Soviets consolidated their hold on the Baltic States and began moving into Eastern Europe. By late 1944, Harriman shared George F. Kennan's belief that the United States should check Soviet expansionism. When even the Soviets' abandonment of Polish Home Army did not compel Roosevelt to get tough with Stalin, Harriman held out the faint hope that postwar reconstruction aid and the United Nations could control Soviet behavior. By January 1946, the depressing reality of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe shattered Harriman's last illusions. He left Moscow in January 1946 (pp. 210-59).
Dunn concludes that Roosevelt erred in ignoring the warnings of his anti-Stalinist ambassadors. Had Roosevelt done so, Dunn believes the United States could have stopped or prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, Roosevelt could have persuaded the American people to make World War II in a crusade against "all inhuman ideologies" (p. 271). Instead, Dunn concludes, Roosevelt's alliance with Stalin "cheated the American war of a democratic vision" (p. 270).
I find these allegations particularly troubling. Earlier in the text, Dunn asserts that the Soviet-American partnership "undercut the Roosevelt's proclaimed goals in fighting the war. The Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter seemed to be empty words after the Soviet Union became an American ally" (p. 157). Given that the United States and Britain forged the Atlantic Charter alone and prior to joining forces with the Soviets, this charge is particularly mean-spirited. One does not even have to be a Roosevelt apologist to disagree with Dunn. One could point to the existence of racial segregation in the United States and British colonialism as evidence that the Atlantic Charter was already hollow--the Soviet-American alliance notwithstanding. Whatever the hypocrisy imbued in the Atlantic Charter, most Americans were committed to defeating Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. Having evinced little interest in either the Stalinist purges or Hitler's atrocities against the Jews throughout the 1930s, it is unlikely that the American public would have waged war to rid the world of all democracy's foes. Dunn's suggestion that they would have leapt at the chance to do so is wishful thinking.
In the end, Dunn's arguments are only partially convincing. While I do not think that the United States could have prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, I accept Dunn's contention that American inaction enabled Stalin to gain additional territory and to retain disputed territories. Dunn's analyses of Eastern and Central European politics and the regions' wartime experiences are top-notch. His treatment of the complicated Polish issue is outstanding. His narratives of the various diplomatic conferences and battles over the opening of the second front are also persuasive and cogent.
Dunn's work is less successful as an assessment of Roosevelt's foreign policy. He underestimates the impact of the Great Depression on American diplomacy. He downplays the global dimensions of World War II. He omits the economic dimensions of U.S. wartime diplomacy and postwar planning.[12] Dunn's examination of the decision to exclude the Soviets from the Manhattan Project is underdeveloped. Decolonization, Anglo-American tensions, and mobilization also receive little attention.
The author consistently ignores issues beyond the parameters of the U.S.-USSR partnership and engages in conjecture. Stalin, Dunn claims, "would have been minimally satisfied with controlling eastern Poland, the Baltic States, the Finnish lands that he annexed after the Winter War, and the Romanian regions of Bessarabia and northern Bokovina. The rest of East Central Europe could theoretically have been free of Stalinism by prior agreement" (p. 136). Similarly, Dunn contends, "Stalinism might have been contained, and possibly with no extension of the Soviet empire into East Europe as justification for its legitimacy and as a reward for the sacrifices of the Russian people, it would collapsed in the Soviet Union much earlier than when it finally did in the 1990s" (p. 196). Given how freely the Big Three interpreted wartime deals, Dunn's speculation is unpersuasive.[13] Furthermore, such sweeping proclamations reflect Cold War triumphalism and presentism, not objectivity and sound methodology.
A final quibble is Dunn's occasionally careless use of secondary literature. One glaring example is his citation of Roy Cohn's biography of Joseph McCarthy to support the claim that Henry Dexter White was a Soviet spy. Surely, Dunn could have used a less-biased source (FN 75, p. 320). The omission of references to secondary literature about George F. Kennan is also notable.
In summation, Dunn's Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin is a mixed bag. While its strengths make it a worthwhile addition to Roosevelt historiography, its weaknesses ensure that this analysis will not be the last word.
Notes:
[1]. The literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt is enormous. For positive appraisals, see William M. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Age of Roosevelt 3 vols.., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957-60); James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956); and Frank Friedel, Franklin D. Roosevelt 4 vols., (Boston: Little-Brown, 1952).
[2]. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: the Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Co-Operation with Russia (New York: The Viking Press, 1947); William C. Bullitt, "How We Won the War and Lost the Peace," Life 25 (30 August 1948); and Hanson W. Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War (London: A. Redman, 1950).
[3]. See, for example, Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Gaddis Smith, American Diplomacy during the Second World War, 1941-45, 1st ed. (New York: Wiley, 1965); and Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969). For an excellent examination of this historiography, see Mark A. Stoller, "A Half-Century of Conflict: Interpretations of U.S. World War II Diplomacy," in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941 ed. J. Michael Hogan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 165-205.
[4]. Robert Dalleck, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 3-16; Gaddis Smith, American Wartime Diplomacy during the Second World War, 1941-1945 2nd ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985); Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7-131; and Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1997).
[5]. Frederick W. Marks, III, Wind Over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Robert Nisbet, Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
[6]. Edward Bennett, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Search for Victory: American-Soviet Relations, 1939-1945 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1990); Remi Nadeau, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt Divide Europe (New York: Praeger, 1990); and Amos Perlmutter, FDR & Stalin: A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943-1945 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993).
[7]. Dunn cites documentation from several major archives including the Library of Congress, the Public Record Office, the Archive of Foreign Affairs (Moscow), the National Archives, the FDR Library, records of the Comintern and the Second World War, and the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Contemporary Historical Documents (Moscow).
[8]. See J. Garry Clifford, "Bureaucratic Politics" in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations eds. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas Paterson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 141-150; Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, "Art is Democracy and Democracy is Art: Culture, Propaganda, and the Neue Zeitung in Germany, 1944-1947," Diplomatic History 23 (Winter 1999): 21-43.
[9]. For a broader interpretation of U.S.-Soviet relations, see Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991); Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Sylvia R. Marguilies, The Pilgrimage to Russia: The Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners, 1924-1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); David Engerman, "America, Russia, and the Romance of Economic Development" (U.C. Berkeley, Ph.D.diss., 1998).
[10]. On Robert Kelley and other U.S. specialists on the Soviets, see Hugh De Santis, The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933-1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
[11]. See, for example, Frank Costigliola, "'Unceasing Pressure for Penetration:' Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formulation of the Cold War," Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1309-1339; Reinhold Wagnleitner, The Coca-Colonization of the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984); and Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, and D.F.J. Bosscher, eds., Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993).
[12]. See, for example, William J. Barber, Designs Within Disorder: Franklin Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Thomas G. Paterson, Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., A Search for Solvency: Bretton Woods and the International Monetary System, 1941-1971 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975).
[13]. The Yalta Accords are an excellent example. See Melvyn P. Leffler, "Adherence to Agreements: Yalta and the Experiences of the Early Cold War." International Security 11 (Summer 1986): 88-123.
This review was commissioned for H-Pol by Lex Renda <renlex@uwm.edu>
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-pol.
Citation:
Laura A. Belmonte. Review of Dunn, Dennis J., Caught Between Roosevelt & Stalin: America's Ambassadors to Moscow.
H-Pol, H-Net Reviews.
March, 1999.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2924
Copyright © 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.