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Prudent Statesmen: Kissinger, Truman, and Thatcher

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Alberto R. Coll
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Abstract

Review essay of “Diplomacy,” by Henry Kissinger; “Truman,” by David McCullough; and “The Downing Street Years,” by Margaret Thatcher.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 9 , March 1995 , pp. 193 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1995

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References

1 For a recent thoughtful assessment—not altogether sympathetic to Truman—of the United States' alternatives to dropping the bomb, see Bernstein, Barton J., “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 1995), 135–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 See Kagan, Donald, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1991Google Scholar).

3 Thatcher's intellectual debt to Edmund Burke is clear in her delightfully blunt comments on the French Revolution appropos the Bicentennial festivities she attended in Paris in 1989: “For me as a British Conservative, with Edmund Burke the father of Conservatism and first great perceptive critic of the revolution as my ideological mentor, the events of 1789 represent a perennial illusion in politics. The French Revolution was a Utopian attempt to overthrow a traditional order—one with many imperfections certainly—in the name of abstract ideas, formulated by vain intellectuals, which lapsed, not by chance but through weakness and wickedness, into purges, mass murder, and war.” She proceeded to give Francois Mitterand as a gift for the occasion a first edition of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, (p. 753).Google Scholar