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George S. Patton, one of the United States’ greatest field commanders, played a vital role in American involvement in World War I and the creation of the United States Tank Corps. While most literature focuses solely on Patton’s life and performance in World War II, the Great War was a pivotal event in his life and military career. Patton gained his first command in World War I with the United States Tank Corps. As the first “tanker” in United States Army history, Patton set up the first American light tank school and later commanded the 1st Tank Brigade in two campaigns, St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne offensive. The study focuses on Patton’s personal life, his decision to push for an assignment with John J. Pershing, and his roles as a staff officer for the American Expeditionary Force and ultimately as a small unit commander pioneering a new weapons system..

As a Communist state bordering Vietnam, China actively supported Ho Chi Minh’s wars against France in 1950–1954 and then America in 1965–1970. This book uses new Communist sources to offer an unprecedented Chinese military perspective on the Vietnam War. By documenting the level of Chinese military assistance to Vietnam, it reveals the extent to which the Chinese support of Ho’s military and political objective in the wars was a crucial and indispensable factor in North Vietnam’s victory. The study offers an overview and the particulars of Chinese aid to Ho’s army, or PAVN, in terms of training, weaponry, logistics, advisors, and technology during its transformative years of 1950–1956 in depth and detail based on a foundation of multiple documentary sources, memoirs, interviews, and secondary sources both in China and in Vietnam. With Chinese assistance, the PAVN experienced three important transformative changes from a peasant, rebellion force to a regular, national army. In retrospect, international Communist support to North Vietnam proved to be the decisive edge that enabled the PAVN, or NVA, to survive the American Rolling Thunder bombing campaign and helped the NLF, also known as the Viet Cong, to prevail in the war of attrition and eventually defeat South Vietnam. An international perspective may help students and the public in the West to gain a better understanding of America’s long war.

The Motion Picture Production Code controlled the content and final cut on all films made and distributed in the US from 1934 to 1968. Code officials protected sensitive ears from the standard four-letter words as well as a few five-letter words like tramp and six-letter words like cripes. They also scrubbed ‘excessively lustful’ kissing from the screen, and ensured that no criminal went unpunished. Censors demanded an average of twenty changes, ranging from trivial to mind-boggling, on each of Alfred Hitchcock’s films during his most productive years. No production escaped these changes, which rarely improved the finished film. Code reviewers dictated the ending of’ Rebecca, shortened the shower scene in’ Psycho, absolved Cary Grant of guilt in’ Suspicion, edited Cole Porter’s lyrics in’ Stage Fright, and decided which shades should be drawn in’ Rear Window. Nevertheless, Hitchcock still managed to push the boundaries of sex and violence permitted in films by charming (and occasionally tricking) the censors and by swapping off bits of dialogue, plot points, and individual shots (some of which had been deliberately inserted as trading chips) to protect cherished scenes and images. The director’s priorities in dealing with the censors highlight both his theories of suspense and the single-mindedness of Code officials. Hitchcock and the Censors’ traces the forces that led to the Production Code and describes Hitchcock’s interactions with Code officials on a film-by-film basis as he fought to protect his creations, bargaining with Code reviewers and sidestepping censorship to produce a lifetime of memorable films.

This book explores French president Charles de Gaulle’s frank, persistent, and discrete campaign to dissuade President Kennedy from expanding the American military/economic aid program in Vietnam from their first summit meeting between in May 1961 up until Kennedy green-lit a coup against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in the late summer of 1963. There were many thorny issues that complicated the Franco-American relationship in the early 1960s—ranging from nuclear policy, British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), and conditions for negotiating with Moscow—but Vietnam was the one case where de Gaulle was unquestionably right and Kennedy terribly wrong in hindsight. Kennedy’s decision to ignore de Gaulle on this matter was far costlier than any other, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers, turned hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese into refugees, and dealt a massive blow to American prestige across the globe. Despite de Gaulle’s efforts to constructively share French experience and use his resources to help engineer an American exit, the Kennedy administration responded to his peace initiatives with bitter silence and inaction. In the end, the Kennedy administration assumed that it was uniquely qualified to win “hearts and minds” in the Third World, while the discredited imperialists in the Élysée in Paris had lost their right to formulate Western policy in Southeast Asia by virtue of a long string of humiliating military defeats in their former colonies.

Landpower in the Long War is the first holistic account of the projection of landpower during the wars of post-9/11. Moving beyond the existing accounts of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the book includes vital chapters on socio-cultural and institutional factors that influence the power-projection of American landpower. Although there are a number of positive accounts herein, such as the recounting of successful humanitarian missions, the underlying theme is one of the need for landpower reform better to achieve U.S. strategic objectives. This is not an account of why America has looked to military power in the post-9/11 world, but how it has projected it.

The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology offers a fresh retrospective on the influential career of Senator J. William Fulbright, a leading foreign policy thinker and the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in American history. Juxtaposing Fulbright’s career as a foreign policy intellectual, including his powerful framing of post–World War II liberal internationalism, with his advocacy for the eponymous educational exchange program that he devised, this book contextualizes liberal internationalism within a broader sweep of US foreign policy thinking. Especially relevant is the role of American culture and political institutions in the formulation of liberal internationalism as well as the erosion of liberal internationalist confidence in the years after the Vietnam War, all exemplified by Fulbright’s public utterances, his conduct in office, and the foreign influence of the famed scholarly exchange program that bears his name.

This work examines the relationships that developed between the domestic U.S. press and the Central Intelligence Agency, from the foundation of the agency in 1947 to the first major congressional investigation of the U.S. intelligence system in 1975–1976. The press environment in which the CIA developed had important consequences for the types of activities the agency undertook, and after some initial difficulties the CIA enjoyed a highly favorable press environment in its early years. The CIA did, on occasion, attempt to use reporters operationally and spread propaganda around the world. This work argues, however, that a more important factor in the generally positive press environment that the early CIA enjoyed was the social relationships that developed between members of the press, especially management, and members of the agency. Common ties of elite education, wartime service, and a shared view of the danger of communism allowed the agency both to conduct a variety of activities without exposure in the United States, and to protect itself from oversight and establish its place in the U.S. national security bureaucracy. Even during the height of cooperative ties, however, there were those in the press critical of the CIA and others who, even if cooperating, were wary of agency activities. Over time, these countertrends increased as the Cold War consensus frayed, and press attention led to sustained investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the infamous Year of Intelligence, 1975–1976.

A safety pin was all that kept Spectacular Bid from racing immortality. On the morning of the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel in horse racing’s prestigious Triple Crown, Spectacular Bid stepped on a safety pin in his stall, injuring his foot. He had won the first two races in impressive fashion but finished third that day, losing his chance for a Triple Crown. But that did not stop him from becoming one of horse racing’s greatest competitors—in fact, in the words of his trainer, Grover “Bud” Delp, he was “the greatest horse ever to look through a bridle.” The battleship-gray colt won twenty-six of thirty races during his career, with two second-place finishes and one third. He was voted the tenth greatest Thoroughbred of the twentieth century by Blood-Horse magazine, and the book A Century of Champions placed him ninth in the world and third among North American horses—ahead of the immortal Man o’ War. Spectacular Bid: The Last Superhorse of the Twentieth Century is the story of a horse that was owned, trained, and ridden by people who weren’t part of the Kentucky establishment. Harry Meyerhoff paid only $37,000 for Bid, but inspite of his less than stellar pedigree, he became one of racing’s immortals.

Before 1940, East Asia and the Pacific were contested regions. The United States vied with the Empire of Japan for the strategic domination of the Pacific Basin. To a lesser degree, the formerly hegemonic colonial powers of Britain, France, and the Netherlands still controlled portions of the region. At the same time, subjugated peoples in East Asia and Southeast Asia struggled to throw off colonialism. By the late 1930s, the competition exploded into armed conflict. Japan looked to be the early victor, but by 1945 the United States established itself as the hegemonic power in the Pacific Basin. New rivals, however, arose in the form of Communist and liberation movements on the Asian continent. In War in the American Pacific and East Asia, 1941–1972, editor Hal Friedman brings together nine essays that explore aspects of the Pacific War that remain understudied or, in some cases, entirely unexamined. Chapters present traditional subjects of the conflict in new ways, with essays on interservice rivalry and military advising, as well as unique topics new to military history, particularly the investigations of strategic communications, military public relations, institutional cultures of elite forces, foodways, and the military’s interaction with the press. Together, these essays firmly establish the Pacific War as the pivotal point in the twentieth century in the Pacific Basin.