Pernicious effects all. A valuable account of the impact of international politics on domestic policy.
Merge the Great Society with the war in Vietnam, and you get the War on Society. So this slender historical essay demonstrates, making provocative connections with the ’60s and our own time.
The Vietnam War changed the tenor of American politics: thanks to lies spun out of the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, a sizable number of Americans came to mistrust the government—and to stop voting. Even William Fulbright, that exemplar of enlightened government, said, “The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust government statements.” But just as the war changed domestic politics, writes Small (History/Wayne State Univ.; The Presidency of Richard Nixon, 1999), domestic politics governed the conduct of the Vietnam War. The conflict became a political issue, if a minor one, as early as the 1956 election, when, amazingly, Adlai Stevenson accused Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on communism by allowing the partition of Vietnam. The charge didn’t sway voters. Small suggests that one reason Lyndon Johnson tried to keep the escalation of the war hush-hush was that he knew his political enemies would try to force a choice between his Great Society programs and American military involvement abroad, just as they had forced tax cuts that, in the end, made the costs of both economically disastrous. Johnson (and, in his turn, Richard Nixon) found himself beset by unexpected political dilemmas at every juncture: call up the reserves, where the children of the well-to-do were waiting out the war, and he risked creating a powerful army of antiwar elders; spend more on weapons, and he risked the rise of ruinous inflation. Yet the strangest of the outcomes may have been the rightward drift of American labor, the rise of a Republican South, the alienation of the Silent Majority, and the vilification of all things liberal—the very things, in other words, that make the world safe for today’s neoconservatives.
Pernicious effects all. A valuable account of the impact of international politics on domestic policy.Pub Date: May 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-593-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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