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The Shaping of Containment: Harry S. Truman, the National Security Council, and the Cold War By Sara L. Sale. (Saint James, N.Y.: Brandywine, 1998. xii, 250 pp. Cloth, $53.25, ISBN 1-881089-15-0. Paper, $19.25, ISBN 1881089-15-0.)
Truman and Korea: The Political Culture of the Early Cold War. By Paul G. Pierpaoli Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. xiv, 261 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-8262-1206-9.)
"I suppose," observed Harry S. Truman in his 1953 farewell address, "that history will remember my term in office as the years when the `cold war' began to overshadow our lives." Historians have amply fulfilled his expectation-and deservedly so. The unfolding of the Cold War during Truman's presidency decisively transformed the place of the United States in the international order and carried profound political, economic, social, and cultural ramifications for American domestic life. In particular, the conjunction of the Cold War's international and domestic impact on the United States was manifested in the construction of a socalled national security state in this period.
These two works examine different facets of that historic mobilization of national will and resources. Sara L. Sale focuses on the role of the National Security Council (NSC) in steering the Truman administration's implementation of containment strategy. Paul G. Pierpaoli Jr. examines the far-reaching consequences for the American political economy of the first major military confrontation of the Cold War, the Korean War.
Although focusing on the Nsc's formative years, Sale's book is neither a...