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Cold War Strategist: Stuart Symington and the Search for National Security. . - Net Assessment - book review

Aerospace Power Journal, Summer, 2002 by John H. Barnhill

Cold War Strategist: Stuart Symington and the Search for National Security by Linda McFarland. Praeger Publishers (http://auburnhouse.com/praeger.htm), 88 Post Road West, Westport, Connecticut 06881-5007, 2001, 240 pages, $62.00.

Never read the liner notes. They inevitably promise more than the author delivers. On occasion, the author commits the liner-note sin, and this book is a case in point.

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McFarland claims that Symington (1901-88) began moving from cold warrior to dove in the middle of his Senate career when he started to become aware of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and administration deceit in Southeast Asia: "Symington evolved from a Gold Warrior who rarely questioned Pentagon decisions to a distinguished Senator who became not only less enchanted with policy makers but even suspicious of them. This was the most striking characteristic of his long public career" (p. 4). Unfortunately, the argument does not stand up to a reasonably close reading of the author's own evidence. Rather, her Symington is a consistent partisan, liberal-Democrat cold warrior. Symington's approach to foreign affairs, including Vietnam, was always win or withdraw but never half-step. That's the position of a hawk, not a dove.

Also, although her argument is that Symington became disenchanted with covert activity over time, she specifically says that his shocked reaction at public revelations about CIA wrongdoing during the Nixon-era secret wars in Laos and Cambodia was at least in part a pose. He was more provoked by the Nixon administration's disregard for the Senate than by the wars. He had been receiving the classified briefings during the Johnson administration and had knowledge of a long-standing pattern of CIA behavior. In fact, he approved of it until he got tired of Johnson's dilatory approach to the Vietnam War (p.157).

So, the book has problems with its logic. Oddly, the flaw does not weaken the work all that much. McFarland compensates by diligent research into a long-neglected career. The book offers more than enough to justify a new look at the senator from the Air Force.

So who was Stuart Symington if he wasn't the cold warrior who eventually saw the light of reason and peace? For one thing, he was a hardheaded businessman whose specialty was turning around failing companies. His success in business brought him into the Truman administration, where he served as undersecretary for air and first secretary of the Air Force; later on, he also held a couple of other subcabinet positions.

As secretary of the Air Force, he fought for 70 groups as opposed to Truman/Johnson's 48. He also tried to get the Air Force a larger share of the minuscule (less than $15 billion) defense budgets of the late 1940s. He was a good cold warrior whose planes made the Berlin airlift a success. And he wanted B-36s to carry the bomb. He had no noticeable aversion to the United States attacking monolithic communism while it had the nuclear upper hand. Consistently, he had a habit of exaggerating both the Soviet threat and the weakness of the American military, especially the Air Force. Furthermore, he was among the first to get the military into missile development and to advocate arms reduction, but never at the expense of preparedness.

He broke with Eisenhower and Truman because he regarded them as miserly in supporting the defense budgets. He was against limited wars from Korea through Vietnam and highly critical of Ike's action in Suez. Symington was one of the originators of the "missile gap" charge that Kennedy played so well against Nixon in 1960. And he was a party loyalist.

He decided in 1952 to run for the Senate against an isolationist. He won, served four terms, and made a minor run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. He ran for the Senate despite Truman's endorsement of the Pendergast candidate in the Democratic primary, In the Senate, he was in on the Army McCarthy hearings, and for much of the time served on Foreign Affairs and Intelligence, among other committees.

The big question I had about this book was whether it was an intellectual history with authorial insights into Symington's change and what it means for others similarly situated. Would it reveal Stuart Symington as an anomaly, or is this a pattern shared by many cold warriors? Why does Symington matter enough to justify the labor that went into this volume? I had hoped that it would provide more insights into the thought processes of Symington, a representative cold warrior. Unfortunately, Cold War Strategist is close to straight narrative. Probably, the sources limit the approach: the bibliography is full of sources that filter out the real person. Interviews, press releases, secondary works, and official or semiofficial letters give public views instead of private ones. This book is a public biography of one element--foreign affairs--of Stuart Symington's robust public life. It ignores his domestic political concerns, which were extensive. McFarland's book is good for what it does, but that is not what it intends or what a biography should do. Unfortunately, the two available full biographies date from Symington's presidential campaign of 1960, so McFarland's is the definitive work on his foreign policy. Fortunately, even with its occasional lapses of interpretation, it does provide a well-researched and readable examination of the foreign-policy career of a long-time cold war liberal.

Government Industry

Cold War Strategist: Stuart Symington and the Search for National Security. . - Net Assessment - book review

Aerospace Power Journal, Summer, 2002 by John H. Barnhill

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