Download e-book for kindle: Harold Stassen: Eisenhower, the Cold War, and the Pursuit of by Lawrence S. Kaplan

Harold Stassen (1907--2001) garnered accolades because the thirty-one-year-old "boy ask yourself" governor of Minnesota and speedy assumed a countrywide position as aide to Admiral William Halsey Jr. in the course of global battle II. while Dwight D. Eisenhower was once elected in 1952, Stassen used to be named director of the Mutual safety management after which turned the president's specified assistant for disarmament. during this place, Stassen had the facility to profoundly form the country's international coverage and have become influential in early chilly battle coverage discussions in regards to the limits and makes use of of traditional and nuclear guns.

In this nuanced biography, Lawrence S. Kaplan demonstrates that Stassen's position in Eisenhower's White apartment merits extra research than it has got from students. Stassen got here to Washington advocating the full removing of nuclear guns, yet he fast got here to acknowledge that this may no longer ensue. He refocused his efforts, operating for larger overseas transparency and verbal exchange. The liberal internationalism that Stassen espoused turned embedded in chilly warfare coverage for many years, and he continuously supplied a voice for peace in an more and more hawkish nationwide protection institution.

Stassen, in lots of methods, was once his personal worst enemy; his ambition and ego undermined his efforts and clouded his imaginative and prescient. His feuds with Secretary of country John Foster Dulles have been mythical, and whereas Dulles usually prevailed within the assembly room, Stassen's imaginative and prescient of nuclear restraint used to be one who Eisenhower shared. Kaplan's learn presents a brand new point of view on nuclear disarmament in the course of a serious interval in US historical past and sheds mild on Eisenhower's method of foreign relations.