Nicholas Evan Sarantakes

Moscow versus Los Angeles: the Nixon White House wages Cold War in the Olympic selection process

In 1970 the Nixon Administration bribed members of the International Olympic Committee in an effort to bring the 1976 summer games to Los Angeles. These actions injected Cold War issues into the process of selecting Olympic host cities. This effort initiated a political confrontation with the Soviet Union, since Moscow was another of the candidate cities. Although weak and vulnerable to political assaults, the International Olympic movements decentralized organizational nature made it difficult for the Nixon White House to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles. The administration learned from this failure and was more successful in offering more limited support to efforts to host the 1980 Winter Olympics.

The Teahouse Tempest: The U.S. Occupation of Okinawa and The Teahouse of August Moon

The United States occupied the Japanese island of Okinawa as a colony in everything but name for twenty-seven years after World War II ended in August 1945. This action ran counter to the avowed U.S. foreign policy principle of self-determination. Novelist Vern Sneider, a former U.S. Army civil affairs officer who had been stationed on the island during the postwar years, was a critic of the occupation. For that reason he chose to use his first novel The Teahouse of the August Moon, published in 1951, to offer a critique of policies that he believed were ethnocentric and counterproductive to U.S. national interests. Although Teahouse grew in popularity in the United States as it became a play and then a theatrical film, it failed to have any influence on U.S. foreign policy. This was because playwright John Patrick removed the critique as he adapted the story for these different media formats. The Teahouse story does show, however, how world affairs can provide issues that engage large sections of the American public at many different levels.

A Review of “Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan”

his hypothesis that the command culture and, thus, the leadership and performance of the Army of the United States was seriously deficient. So significant is the charge in Muth’s book that this reviewer was left wondering how the United States Army, locked into the straitjacket of a dogmatic doctrinal approach to war and command and led by generations of unintelligent and incurious senior officers, ever defeated the German Heer in battle. The extension of such opinion into an indictment of United States Army divisions, corps, and army commanders’ battlefield performance during the Second World War begs credulity. For example, Muth’s claim for the superiority of the German method and auftragstaktik in the Battle for France in 1940 and the crossing of the Meuse River at Sedan is not supported by archival evidence. Although he quotes or interprets two senior German officers to the effect that it was up to the formations themselves to determine how to cross the river and reach the English Channel (174), in fact, the crossing of the Meuse and the intent to drive to the channel coast were both meticulously planned, with nearly 100 divisions taking part in the attack, and exercised in a March 1940 war game. Muth’s work is an important and controversial contribution to the body of work that considers the relative merits of army officer training, education, and preparation for battle. His strong substitution of opinion for fact, however, makes this comparative study both problematic and disappointing.

A Review of “Empire Lost: Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War”: Stewart, Andrew, New York: Continuum Books 256 pp.,

In Empires Lost, Andrew Stewart examines the “alliance within an alliance” (viii) that Great Britain had with its self-governing dominions—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa—and sets out to explain “the matter in which it operated throughout the Second World War” (ix). He ultimately comes to the conclusion that the war against the Axis powers destroyed the unity that was central to the structure of the British imperial system. What follows is basically a diplomatic history, if that term can be used to describe a work of the British imperial history. The influence of the secretary of state for dominion affairs varied according to the individual’s stature in London. Anthony Eden and Clement Attlee, future prime ministers, both held this office, but Viscount Cranborne did the most significant work in it and slowly gained influence with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Stewart gives us a more complex portrait of the prime minister than one might expect. Churchill clearly understood that large political and economic forces were working against Britain’s dominance, and he was often aware of the political challenges that his fellow prime ministers faced in their domestic political arenas. At the same time, he wanted the dominions to do as they were told. His diplomatic energies were aimed at the United States and the Soviet Union, and he often interpreted the various parts of the British Commonwealth through the lens of nineteenth-century history and much earlier trips to these regions, even though societies there had changed dramatically over the first few decades of the twentieth century. Personal contact with leading figures from the various dominions also played a significant role in Churchill’s approach to the king’s other realms. The text supports Stewart’s argument in a clear fashion. His research is extensive. He collected the a ton of frequent flier miles as he did research in fifty-seven archive collections housed on four continents. The prose and organization is best described as adequate, but at times Stewart shows real literary talent. Stewart’s coverage raises a number of issues and questions. There is no exploration of the United Kingdom’s complicated relationship with Ireland, or Eire, as it was then called. Stewart readily admits that he has no intention of studying this relationship and that, in fact, the omission is probably appropriate. Irish ties with the rest of the commonwealth were fading, if not entirely dissolved, by 1939. Although Stewart’s primary focus is on the diplomatic, a broader examination of military operations and domestic politics also raises questions that make his argument less certain. Although William Mackenzie King, prime minister of Canada, talked a lot about pursuing a course separate from that of London, the Canadians did pretty much whatever the British wanted. Canadian Army units adopted British doctrine and equipment, and they fought in Italy in separate formations under British generals. Mackenzie King agreed to expand the Royal Canadian Navy as Churchill requested. Australian Prime Minister John Curtin was clearly pushing for a bigger British presence in the Pacific and was sounding more like an imperial politician than an Australian nationalist at the time of his death, which played well with the electorate. In fact, there is a good deal of evidence to show that Australia and New Zealand’s ties to the mother country remained strong for another two decades. All in all, Empire Lost is a good read.