The Policy Makers: Shaping American Foreign Policy from 1974 to the Present.

Miller, William J.

The Policy Makers: Shaping American Foreign Policy from 1974 to the Present. Edited by Anna Kasten Nelson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. 188 pp.

In The Policy Makers: Shaping American Foreign Policy from 1974 to the Present, Anna Kasten Nelson has collected a series of seven chapters that help place a face on American foreign policy. While much academic research has focused on the various influences on American foreign policy, little research has taken a critical look at the individuals within these institutions and the roles they have played in the policy process. As a result of the Cold War, presidents no longer solely depended on their secretaries of state as the sole determiner of policy; instead, they chose to begin expanding the actors involved with shaping foreign policy to include individuals from the military, intelligence departments, and personal advisors located within the White House. By focusing on these individuals, Anna Kasten Nelson and her contributors highlight the impacts of various individuals on American foreign policy who have otherwise not been fully discussed in such a role in the academic literature.

The book begins with a brief introduction from Nelson that serves as little more than overview of the text. Within it, Nelson explains how the National Security Act of 1947 shapes the book's contents by "creating a united military establishment, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a National Security Council" (p. 1). Rather than only relying on secretaries of state, presidents now had the secretaries of defense, directors of central intelligence, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and advisors on national security joining in discussions. The volume begins its case studies by examining how Paul Nitze, as head of the State Department Planning Staff, altered the previous policies of George Kennan and deliberately changed U.S. Cold War policy with the drafting of NSC 68. The second chapter remains in the State Department and looks at Robert Bowie, an often forgotten head of policy planning under John Foster Dulles, who despite living in the shadows, was influential in relations between the United States and Europe in the formative years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Moving away from the State Department, the third chapter looks instead at the impact of national security advisor Walt Whitman Rostow's firm belief that Vietnam could be won on President Lyndon Johnson's policy decisions. The other national security advisor examined is Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose hard-line views toward Soviet Russia led President Jimmy Carter's response to their initial invasion of Afghanistan. Senator Henry Jackson was a firm supporter of the U.S. military and is examined in this volume for the role he played in preventing President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger from establishing detente with the USSR. A chapter on William Casey highlights how intelligence agencies (the CIA, in this case) can exert influence in negative ways when neutral intelligence becomes policymaking. Lastly, Colin Powell--the only Secretary of State mentioned in the volume--is analyzed for his impact on George H. W. Bush's actions during the Gulf War when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

What Nelson most successfully brings to the academic community in The Policy Makers is a reminder of the role that individuals can have on determining national-level policies. Political science largely assumes that policy is designed to be larger than any one particular individual, but Nelson demonstrates throughout this volume that individuals can have great power in shaping American foreign policy. Even more importantly, she brings attention to "the men behind the scenes as well as those whose status allowed them to stand at the president's shoulder" (p. 3). The chapters included in the work present detailed case studies that are informative and show readers in many places a more comprehensive account of how foreign policy decisions were made within the White House under different presidents than was previously available through mass media reports and more cursory historical examinations.

While each chapter presents detailed, informative examinations of the individual under study, there is no thread to tie the chapters together within the volume. Nelson's introduction does an admirable job of providing a historical overview and time line for the chapters, but there is no attempt to cohesively bring together the chapters at the end, which leaves readers potentially wondering what the value of this volume is, beyond seven independent case studies. While that contribution alone is enough to make The Policy Makers an important read for scholars who examine the presidency and foreign policy, one cannot help but think that there is a missed opportunity for examining the potential impact that variables, such as personality, relationship with the president, decision-making structure, and political time, can have on determining whom presidents turn to for advice on foreign policy issues.

--William J. Miller

Flagler College