A Hero To Most”

Brian McAllister Linn’s book uses the induction of rock and roll icon Elvis Presley into the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960 as a framing device with which to explore the wrenching changes that gripped the army in the two decades that followed the end of World War II. Linn’s study of this under-examined period within the history of the U.S. military is well-sourced and delivered with nuance and subtlety. The result is a work that is at time perhaps inadvertently damning not only of the U.S. Army, but also of the entire Cold War American national security state. Linn is never polemical and consistently sympathetic to the dilemmas that those tasked with building and serving in the U.S. land-based fighting force faced in the early atomic era. But the picture of the army that emerges from this account is one of a chronically dysfunctional, ineffective, and demoralized organization hamstrung not only by its many internal defects, but also by the farcical nuclear doctrine of the early Cold War and the monumental task of policing American hegemony from Berlin to Seoul. Military historians of the Cold War will find much of interest in this book, but so too will those seeking a case study in the pathologies of the Cold War American national security state.

Art · Cold war · Doctrine · Economic history · Framing (construction) · Hegemony · HERO · Icon · Literature · National security · Political science · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History · Law · Nuclear Issues and Defense · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments