Bevan Sewell

“‘We Need Not Be Ashamed of our own Economic Profit Motive”: Britain, Latin America, and the Alliance for Progress, 1959–63’

This article traces British policy discussions over their position in Latin America between 1959 and 1963. In particular, it looks at the way British officials interacted with the John F. Kennedy administrations flagship Alliance for Progress and examines the reasons behind the gradual support for a more engaged UK policy toward the area. This decision, it argues, came about due to a complex set of reasons that challenge the idea that the Anglo-American relationship determined British policy during the cold war. Both the cold war and Anglo-American relations were important in shaping British thinking, but so, too, were calculations over British economic interests. Indeed, as the article demonstrates, it was the interplay of these three elements that shaped British deliberations.

The Pragmatic Face of the Covert Idealist: The Role of Allen Dulles in US Policy Discussions on Latin America, 1953–61

Abstract Assessments of the CIAs role in Latin America during the 1950s have tended to focus predominantly on the twin case studies of Guatemala and Cuba. Consequently, the Agencys role – and, more broadly, that of its head Allen Dulles – has come to be seen as one obsessed with covert action and relatively unimportant in terms of policy discussions. Dulles, in fact, has been portrayed as an unwilling and disinterested participant in policy discussions. The present article will challenge those assertions by suggesting that, by examining Dulless role in the Eisenhower administrations discussions on Latin America, a different picture emerges – one that paints Dulles as an active and rational participant, and which raises important questions for our understanding of the CIAs role during the Eisenhower era.

The Problems of Public Relations: Eisenhower, Latin America and the Potential Lessons for the Bush Administration

Abstract Accompanied by intense media interest, President George W. Bush visited Latin America in March 2007. The trip, it seemed, was a rather obvious attempt to try and improve inter-American relations by demonstrating that the US did care about is neighbours to the South; to counter the seemingly endless bad press and repair some of the damage done to the American brand by Bushs policies and the influence of Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. As this article will demonstrate, though, this was reminiscent of another era: that of the 1950s and the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Throughout his eight years in office, Eisenhower would consistently use public relations operations as a way of improving inter-American relations. However, the intense problems that this eventually brought about suggest that the present administration may have been misguided in its attempts to follow a similar path to its Republican predecessors.

John Foster Dulles, Illness, Masculinity and US Foreign Relations, 1953–1961

ABSTRACT In the last two decades, scholars have increasingly looked to understand the way that socially constructed norms and values have influenced the course of international diplomacy. Yet while much work has been produced on areas such as gender, far less has been written on the way that perceptions of illness affected the way that leading policymakers saw themselves, their allies, and their respective roles in the world. This article, by focusing on former US secretary of state John Foster Dulles, looks at the influence that perceptions of illness had on US foreign relations during the 1950s. First, it argues that US perceptions of British and French weakness – as typified by the ill-health being suffered by those nations’ respective leaders – shaped American responses to the diplomatic crisis that erupted over the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Second, it highlights the substantial changes that took place in US policy when first President Eisenhower, and then subsequently Secretary Dulles, were stricken down by severe illness. In doing so it demonstrates how a better understanding of the relationship between illness, emotions and masculinity can help historians to better understand the course of Cold War foreign relations.

The Political Perils of Cold War Foreign Relations: Adlai Stevenson’s Democrats and Foreign Policy in the 1956 Presidential Election

ABSTRACT This analysis uses the case of the 1956 American presidential election between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower to highlight the ways that an obsession with foreign relations could prove problematic to a campaign. Focusing primarily on Stevenson’s advisors, long-standing problems in the Democrats’ strategy on foreign relations, coupled with the emotional attachments that several key advisors had to the issue, combined to ensure that the Democrats failed to develop an effective foreign policy platform—particularly when running against a president believed to be so successful in that arena. Ultimately, it argues that the Stevenson campaign’s failure to forge an effective position highlights the problematic relationship between domestic policies and foreign relations.

The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality. By Thomas Borstelmann.

One of the most fertile areas of historical investigation in recent years has been that of the 1970s. Previously considered something of a lost decade, the era has been rejuvenated by the proliferation of studies looking at important matters such as the rise of conservatism, the emergence of globalization and transnational human rights networks, and the roots of present day economic systems. Rather than a forgotten period between the more progressive 1960s and the prosperity of the 1980s, scholars now argue the 1970s decade was in fact an important moment in its own right. Thomas Borstelmann’s new book seeks to provide a synthesis of these rapidly developing fields and, as he puts it in the book’s preface, to match up the more typical ‘tale of decline, uncertainty, and self-centeredness’ with the ‘lively, exciting, and contentious era’ that he remembered living through (p. xii). To a large extent the book successfully achieves these goals – and does so, moreover, in a persuasive and enlightening way. In Borstelmann’s telling, the 1970s emerge as an era of fluctuation, change and important social developments. At the heart of his account are three interrelated stories: the rise of financial inequality, the growth of greater social diversity and inclusivity, and the international collapse of global empires and traditional state power. The most important of these for this book’s argument, however, are the first two; indeed, much of the book focuses on that central conundrum of why a period of rising financial inequality was also one of greater political equality. ‘Amidst the confusing crosscurrents of the 1970s’, he writes, ‘it was not clear that the United States would emerge both more committed to formal equality in the public sphere and less actually equal in measurable economic terms’ (p. 18). It is when Borstelmann gets closest to explaining the reasons behind these seemingly divergent trends that the book is, arguably, at its most impressive. As he notes in Chapter 3, the embracement of free market ideals and rhetoric – with Americans across the country espousing ‘anew the mechanisms of supply and demand and the priority of the private realm of individual choice over the public realm of shared community commitments’ (p. 172) – proved able to sit comfortably alongside greater political inclusivity. Central to both, indeed, were the notions of increased private freedom and choice. Americans, whether in economic or societal terms, wanted to be free to choose their own path away from government interference. A more acute rendering of this trend, however, and a clear insight into its potential shortcomings, are provided when the book charts the rise of pornography, gambling and the emergence of more open attitudes towards sex. This was especially true, Borstelmann notes, in the rapid growth of the pornography industry. ‘The market, in this case, was distributing goods in a way that undercut traditional conservatives’ goals B O O K R EV IE W S

The Perfect and Sustainable Road to Economic Development?: The Eisenhower Administration and Latin America

‘We who are all young nations, in whom the pioneering spirit is still vitally alive, need neither to fear the future nor be satisfied with the present,’ President Dwight D. Eisenhower told the Organization of American States (OAS) in April, 1953.

Beyond the Ends of the Earth: Donald Rumsfeld, the Mantra of Progress, and an Outer-Space View of America's War on Terror

This essay examines the way that US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to apply one of the central lessons of the Vietnam War to the George W. Bush administrations War on Terror after 9/11. Following the disastrous withdrawal from Vietnam, Rumsfeld had argued that one of the major lessons to be taken forward was that, in future conflicts, the US needed to ensure that the war was portrayed to the public in a way that would ensure ongoing success. The way to do this, Rumsfeld subsequently averred, was to convey a message of perpetual, unstoppable, but not too rapid, progress; victory was at hand, but it would take some time to achieve. As part of this process, Rumsfeld developed an elaborate narrative based around a keyhole satellite picture of the Korean peninsula at night – one half, that of South Korea, bathed in the light of progress; the other, North Korea, nearly completely dark. This photo, Rumsfeld suggested, told you all you needed to know about the fact that the US would ultimately succeed in the War on Terror. In taking this approach, however, Rumsfeld unwittingly revealed an inherent contradiction that has continued to blight the administration of Barack Obama: that there is a very fine line between progress toward an inevitable endpoint of victory and progress toward a position whereby the US is able to withdraw. For Rumsfeld, progress was toward an endpoint of victory and it was only the change in political context after 2006 that derailed his attempts to set out this message; for Obama, on the other hand, progress has become a prerequisite for getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq.