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For eight years President Dwight Eisenhower claimed to pursue peace and national security. Yet his policies entrenched the United States in a seemingly permanent cold war, a spiraling nuclear arms race, and a deepening state of national insecurity. This book uncovers the key to this paradox in Eisenhower's unwavering commitment to a consistent way of talking, in private as well as in public, about the cold war rivalry. Contrary to what most historians have concluded, Eisenhower never aimed at any genuine rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The discourse always assumed that the United States would forever face an enemy bent on destroying it, making national insecurity a permanent way of life. The “peace” he sought was only an endless process of managing apocalyptic threats, a permanent state of “apocalypse management,” intended to give the United States unchallenged advantage in every arena of the cold war. The goal and the discourse that supported it were inherently self-defeating. Yet the discourse is Eisenhower's most enduring legacy, for it has shaped the United States' foreign policy ever since, leaving it still a national insecurity state.

This book discusses the role of the U.S. Navy within the country's national security structure during the first decade of the Cold War from the perspective of the service's senior uniformed officer, the Chief of Naval Operations, and his staff. It examines a variety of issues of the period, including the Army–Navy fight over unification that led to the creation of the National Security Act of 1947, the early postwar fighting in China between the Nationalists and the Communists, the formation of NATO, the outbreak of the Korean War, the decision of the Eisenhower Administration not to intervene in the Viet Minh troops' siege of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, and the initiation of the Eisenhower “New Look” defense policy. The author relies upon information obtained from a wide range of primary sources and personal interviews with senior Navy and Army officers. The result is a book that provides the reader with a new way of looking at these pivotal events.

Henry Ford is remembered in American lore as the ultimate entrepreneur—the man who invented assembly-line manufacturing and made automobiles affordable. Largely forgotten is his side career as a publisher of anti-Semitic propaganda. This is the story of Ford's ownership of the Dearborn Independent, his involvement in the defamatory articles it ran, and the two Jewish lawyers, Aaron Sapiro and Louis Marshall, who each tried to stop Ford's war on Jews. In 1927, the case of Sapiro v. Ford transfixed the nation. In order to end the embarrassing litigation, Ford apologized for the one thing he would never have lost on in court: the offense of hate speech. Using never-before-discovered evidence from archives and private family collections, this study reveals the depth of Ford's involvement in every aspect of this case and explains why Jewish civil rights lawyers and religious leaders were deeply divided over how to handle Ford.

This book maps the terrain of memory in the wake of large-scale injustice, using five case studies of how the unjust wartime imprisonment of Nikkei in North America has reverberated in both Canada and the United States over the past six decades: politically engaged sociological writing in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of personal disclosure during American efforts at redress, the political and cultural questions that arose in Canadian redress work, the ritualized commemoration of suffering in the Manzanar pilgrimages and in the codification of Fred Korematsu Day, and the pursuit of retroactive diplomas for Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians forced from their high schools, colleges, and universities in 1942. Building on these case studies, the book offers a transnational study of how Nikkei strive not to lay their past to rest, but instead to perpetuate it in ways that encourage direct, empathetic, and muscular political engagement across often profound cultural and political divides. In this respect, it follows a particularly important thread that binds people together, allows them to coexist, and, thereby, to become more fully human.

This book provides a rare insider's look at one school's experience of dramatic political unrest during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It provides a unique perspective on the events that roiled the campus during this period—a period in which the author served as Stanford University's vice president, provost, and then president. In a cross between memoir and history, the book guides us through major cases of arson, including the destruction of the president's office, the notorious “Cambodia Spring” of 1970—when dozens of students and police were injured—and the forced resignation of another Stanford president after just nineteen months in office. Remarkably, Stanford's prestige and academic strength grew unabated throughout this time of crisis. How this came to pass is the central theme of this book.