Especially important on the overall national security strategy of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration are Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 1953-1961 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); and the relevant chapters in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Reappraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Robert Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), provides a succinct, and highly favorable, early assessment of Eisenhower's Cold War policies; Blanche W. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), offers a more critical perspective. Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006), makes a strong case for the centrality of psychological warfare and public diplomacy in Eisenhower's Cold War strategy. See also Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), on cultural factors shaping Eisenhower's foreign policy. David Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), provides a penetrating analysis of the conflicting assessments of the Soviet threat in the late 1950s.
A useful examination of Eisenhower's approach to leadership and decisionmaking is Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York: Basic Books, 1982). On the different decisionmaking styles of the Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy administrations, consult Meena Bose, Shaping and Signaling Presidential Policy: The National Security Decision Making of Eisenhower and Kennedy (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1998).
For valuable studies of Kennedy's overall strategy, which feature detailed explorations of different regions of the world and topical issues, see the essays in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Diane Kunz (ed.), The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Relations during the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Other important studies include Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Timothy P. Maga, John
F. Kennedy and New Frontier Diplomacy, 1961-1963 (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1994); and the relevant chapters in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment and We Now Know.
For nuclear strategy and European issues during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), is indispensable. Other important studies include Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); David A. Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960,” International Security, 7 (1983), 3-71; Marc Trachtenberg, "'A Wasting Asset': American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance,” International Security, 13 (1988/89), 5-49; H. W. Brands, "The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the National Insecurity State,” American Historical Review, 94 (1989), 963-89; Peter Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Christopher Preble, John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); Andreas Wenger, Living with Peril: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nuclear Weapons (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); and Jeffrey Glen Giauque, Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: The Atlantic Powers and the Reorganization of Western Europe, 1955-1963 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
On Third World strategy and issues, the scholarly literature is now quite voluminous. The following works are particularly useful: Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns (eds.), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); H. W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Robert J. McMahon, "Eisenhower and Third World Nationalism: A Critique of the Revisionists,” Political Science Quarterly, 101 (1986), 453-73; Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982); Madeleine
G. Kalb, The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa - From Eisenhower to Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1982); David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Gordon H. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis,” International Security, 12 (1988), 96-123; Peter L. Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Douglas Little, "Cold War and Covert Action: The United States and Syria, 1945-1958,” Middle East Journal, 44 (1990), 51-75; and Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
World History
