Robert A. Divine

Robert Divine's work on President Dwight Eisenhower's foreign policy provides a compact and readable introduction to the topic. Divine is a "revisionist" in that he attacks the orthodoxy which portrays Dwight Eisenhower as a lazy golfer who left the formulation of foreign policy to his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. In place of this conventional image he substitutes a highly attractive portrait of Eisenhower as a moderate and cautious president who retained control of foreign policy formulation at all important junctures.

The success with which Divine credits Eisenhower in U.S. relations with Asia, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union bears testimony to the fact that revisionism is not inherently critical of its subject matter. In fact, Divine goes beyond simply praising Eisenhower's foreign policy and adopts the "Verstehend" approach of German historicism in that he seems to share many of the same Cold War assumptions which delimited the range and substance of debates in the 1950s over U.S.-Soviet policy. The problem with this book is that Divine's Soviets are the same evil stick figures as they were for policy-makers in the 1950s.

The Soviets may well have been evil, but Divine spends no time demonstrating this. Leaving out an analysis of the Soviet position is a major weakness in his approach since the Soviets serve as foils against which the American hero Eisenhower is developed. Chiding Ike mildly for fuzzy-headed idealism, for instance, he notes sadly that:

"Ike's pursuit of peace was the dominant feature of his presidency, and the failure to secure it his greatest disappointment. This quest was flawed by Eisenhower's uncritical assumption that the Cold War was the result of Russian fear and hostility. He believed that all he had to do was to convince the men in the Kremlin that the United states was not out to encircle or destroy the Soviet Union. Hoping to gain their trust [which for Divine was neither wise, nor perhaps even possible], he believed he could reverse their belligerence and persuade them to accept western solutions •••" (p. 105)

Divine merely assumes that his reader believes along with him that the Soviets were cynics, the Americans sincere idealists.

There are many other examples in the book of this Manichean dualism. Examining his use of language it becomes apparent that for Divine, as for American foreign policy makers in the 1950s, the Soviets were "Russians" who were devotees of "Communism" with a big "C." If he did not want to give the impression that he believes the Soviets to have been inherently aggressive, expansionist, and untrustworthy he should not have plucked this terminology from the early Cold War years. Yet there is plenty of further evidence that this is exactly the impression he wished to convey.… (mere)