The University of Wisconsin Press
History / American Studies / Political Science
Behind the Throne
Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898–1968
Edited by Thomas J. McCormick and Walter LaFeber
During the American rise to world power in the last hundred years, a new presidency has also arisen, a presidency that uses military, economic, political, and personal power that the constitutional founders of the 1780s would have thought highly improbable and dangerous. Behind the Throne argues that United States presidents have received foreign policy advice from a new breed of government servants whose first loyalties were to the chief executive, not the bureaucracy or the public. These "servants of power" defined world views for the president, not only advising but often taking action to implement those world views.
The essays in this volume focus on nine servants of power: Brooks Adams, Charles A. Conant, Admiral William B. Caperton, Thomas W. Lamont, Adolf A. Berle, Thomas C. Mann, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur H. Vandenberg, and Gerald P. Nye. The rise of the United States to the status of the world's lone (and often highly perplexed and frustrated) superpower cannot be understood without understanding these nine influential men and their roles in recent American history.
The volume also stands as a tribute to Fred Harvey Harrington, professor of history and former president of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. All of the contributors began their distinguished careers as students of Harrington.
Thomas J. McCormick is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of China Market and America's Half-Century: US Foreign Policy in the Cold War. Walter LaFeber is professor of history at Cornell University and author of America, Russia, and the Cold War and The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898.
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September 1993
LC: 93-018754 E
288 pp. 6 x 9
1 halftone
Cloth $47.95 s
ISBN 978-0-299-13740-3ADD TO CART
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