The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena.

By Thomas Borstelmann. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 369. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-00597-X.)

Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration favored the "see-no-evil/hear-no-evil" approach. When Sherman Adams resigned, the new White House chief of staff, Wilton Persons, made sure that Frederic Morrow understood this basic rule. Less than two years after the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, no subject was off-limits to Morrow, the only African American on staff, save race and civil rights. Persons, a devout Alabama segregationist, saw that subject as too emotional, as did the chief above this chief. John F. Kennedy's administration took a slightly different approach, with several key officials likening the great southern war on Jim Crow to a snowstorm. The president himself no doubt sat in his Oval Office rocker looking out the window, wondering when it would stop. Of course, nothing stopped. In words recorded by his own taping system, Kennedy exclaimed, "I mean it's just in everything. I mean this has become everything" (p. 169).

The Cold War and the Color Line demonstrates that race was indeed in everything, driving domestic policy and foreign policy alike pretty much since those first Englishmen in Jamestown became Virginians and eventually Americans. The topic has even hovered over the consciences of most slaveholding chief executives, all the way back to George Washington. Andrew Jackson might not have worried much about such things, but Jefferson, Madison, and the other giants shared Lincoln's view of the peculiar institution's impact on American foreign policy: "[It] deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world," thereby allowing "the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites ..." (Lincoln quoted in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II [New Brunswick, N.J., 1953], p. 255). Historians have been catching up lately. Thomas Borstelmann's masterful new book appears on the heels of Mary L. Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J., 2000), a work eagerly anticipated since her 1988 article "Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative" (Stanford Law Review, 41 [November 1988], 61-120).

Borstelmann opens with a brief survey of events prior to 1945, looking first at how slavery and westward expansion joined race and foreign policy at the very heart of the nation's soul and moving on through the contradictions of World War II, when German POWs could dine in the American South's restaurants, but the black soldiers who guarded them could not. The remaining five chapters move from Truman to Reagan and beyond, with the author accomplishing his goal of placing "the history of white supremacy on the same page with the history of the Cold War" (p. ix). Borstelmann's clear analytic framework focuses on three geographic areas (the American South, Africa, and the Soviet Union); three groups utterly resistant to hierarchies built on something other than race and class (Europeans determined to keep their Third World empires intact, equally determined white settlers in Africa, and segregationists in the American black belt); and three groups calling for liberation from Mississippi to South Africa (the civil rights movement at home, the anticolonial movement in Africa, and ironically enough, the commissars of the Kremlin).

This story can certainly be seen, as Borstelmann largely does, as a triumph of American democracy, ending with victory in the Cold War and beginning again with the nation manning the bridge alone, the world's only captain, "the multiracial leader of a multiracial world" (p. 271). Nonetheless, one does not need September 11 to posit a different order. Martin Luther King Jr., among others, integrated the Cold War into his strategy precisely because he understood that conflict as one between two rival empires for the allegiance of the Third World and access to its resources and markets. Now, with the old European empires crumbled and the Soviet upstart imploded, a case could be made that the world has no "O Captain! My Captain!" out of Whitman but rather an emperor out of the first Star Wars. King himself worried about "God's military agent on earth," and needless to say, the people are not all exulting in our own day either.

KENNETH O'REILLY

University of Alaska Anchorage