Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995)
The preface to Michael Sherry's massive study of the last seven decades of United States history begins with this ominous statement: "Since the late 1930s, Americans have lived under the shadow of war." Sherry addresses many issues in order to prove his point, and it will be impossible to address all of them here. As a result, I will focus on Sherry's main premise, that "militarization" (which he defines as "the process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence") has been the most important purpose of the United States' government since it began preparing for World War II. According to Sherry: "This book emphasizes war as an agent of and rationale for the nation's transformation."
In the broadest sense, what Sherry calls "militarization" is a metaphor for large federal programs, organized hierarchically and managed by massive bureaucracies. Sherry explains that "war" was used by practically every president as figure of speech connoting "federal action and presidential leadership, since war was a supremely national enterprise." For example, Franklin Roosevelt invoked "metaphors of war" during the domestic crisis of the early years of his presidency; Lyndon Johnson "declared `war' on countless problems at home and abroad," and George Bush "deployed the full arsenal of military metaphors when he declared his drug war." In some instances, of course, tough talk of war was not figurative. If the conflict in Korea had escalated into general nuclear war, President Truman wrote in his diary that "Moscow, St. Petersburg, Mukden, Vladivostok, Peking, Shanghai, Port Arthur, Dairen, Odessa, Stalingrad, and every manufacturing plant in China and the Soviet Union would be eliminated." According to a phrase in a top-secret American document, large parts of the Soviet Union's urban-industrial infrastructure would have been turned into a "smoking, radiating ruin." In 1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk urged bombing North Vietnam "as a signal to Hanoi and Peiping that they themselves cannot hope to succeed without a substantial escalation on their part, with all the risks they would have to face." Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay made essentially the same point when he suggested threatening the North Vietnamese that the United States would "bomb them back into the Stone Age." Sherry is absolutely correct that "America's civilian leaders often pursued national security and embraced military values more fervently than military officers." In 1950, for example, Secretary of State Dean Acheson directed Paul Nitze to draft the document which became known as known as "NSC-68," which recommended increasing the defense budget by a factor of nearly three, to $35 billion per year. The influence of policymakers such as Nelson Rockefeller, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, and John McCloy (and Sherry could have added many others) during the early years of the Cold War is well known. Sherry is correct that they "had a common background in eastern elite schools, law firms, corporations, and government," and their "shared outlook" did much to shape the United States' approach to the Cold War. David Halberstam described these men with wicked irony as the "best and the brightest." As early as 1956, as Sherry notes, sociologist C. Wright Mills called attention to this "power elite" running a "permanent war economy." In the mid-1960s, when the policy elite turn against the war, President Johnson fumed: "The establishment bastards have bailed out." Sherry explains the erosion of consensus this way: "When American abundance seemed almost limitless, as in the 1940s and 1950s, militarization had seemed almost painlessly affordable, even economically beneficial, with both guns and butter readily attainable." He proceeds to explain: "America's war in Vietnam violated the tacit bargain which supported the nation's militarization after 1945. Militarization had been tolerated as long as it seemed congruent with affluence and progress at home." The end of the Vietnam War provided a lost opportunity to reverse the forces of militarization, at least in international affairs. According to Sherry, Jimmy Carter's inaugural address, "signaled his determination to break from America's militarized past." Sherry explains: "Carter succeeded better than most modern Presidents at managing the affairs of state so as to keep the nation out of war." According to Sherry, Ronald Reagan had a "well-deserved reputation as a Cold Warrior, and his presidency may be best remembered in the popular imagination for what Sherry describes as having "restored national security as America's supreme priority," but Sherry relies on Garry Wills's incisive comment that, in fact, Reagan's "greatest achievements and his political successes" rested in his "shrewd concentration on domestic policy." Sherry quotes John Newhouse that Reagan had the "good luck" never to have "to confront a foreign policy crisis." George Bush, according to Sherry, "like Nixon, lacked any vision for the nation out of the grooves cut by decades of hot and cold war." Sherry proceeds to explain: "By temperament cautious and by experience a Cold Warrior, Bush was not going to rock the conservative boat by... advancing a new agenda." Indeed, according to Sherry, President Bush's chief of staff John Sununu believed that a "short successful war...would guarantee his reelection." The Gulf War proved to be a superb showcase to "display anew America's superior technology," but, according to Sherry, "the Gulf War served Bush's fortunes badly and his other goals at best partially" because, as Bush himself acknowledged, there was no "definitive end" to the conflict. Sherry concludes: "The Cold War's end did not halt militarization,...but it did destroy the most prominent rationale for militarization."
I am not entirely persuaded by Sherry's assertion that "militarization reshaped every realm of American life - politics and foreign policy, economics and technology, culture and social relations - making America a profoundly different nation." However, Sherry is absolutely correct that militarization was an essential feature of the Cold War arms race and also facilitated the vast extension of presidential leadership, operating through large federal programs, on domestic policy issues. In those respects, the shadow of war had profound effects on the United States.
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