Customer Reviews

Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity (Stanford Nuclear Age Series)

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This work by noted religious scholar Ira Chernus is an outstanding analysis of Dwight Eisenhower's way of talking about the Soviet threat at a time when most Americans fully expected (or at least could easily imagine) to see a full blown nuclear war in their lifetime. Eisenhower, Chernus argues, tried to braze Americans for a long conflict that was on the one hand a life-and-death struggle against evil, on the other hand an opportunity for Americans to prove their exceptional democratic values. Put differently, while the secret Doolittle Report on CIA covert operations demanded that America adapt every dirty trick in the communist book, Eisenhower publicly talked about Open Skies and the opportunity for world peace. The pieces never quite fit together.

Together with Kenneth Osgood's Total Cold War, this book represents the cutting edge scholarship (post-Eisenhower revisionism, if you will) on America's Cold War, which started in the 1950s and never ended. I assume that Stanford University Press's prohibitively expensive cover price will keep interested readers from purchasing the book. That is too bad, because the book deserves a wider readership. Get it from your library if necessary!