Inside a Cold War Insider

H. W. (Henry William) Brands has emerged in recent years as one of the most prolific of the younger generation of diplomatic historians. In the first half of the Bush administration alone, Brands has committed so much research to paper as to seemingly bear partial responsibility for the global deforestation problem. His work has been solid and includes contributions to relatively understudied aspects of postwar American diplomacy, such as relations with India and the Third World in general. His books play off one another and focus most sharply on the Eisenhower years.1 In his latest work, Brands, who teaches history at Texas A&M University, offers the first book-length study of Loy Henderson, a prominent State Department diplomat who was, as the book's title points out, a Cold War insider. One of the corps of professional diplomats who rose through the ranks of the newly professional foreign service in the 1920s and 1930s, Henderson went on to help shape the postwar containment policy, especially as it applied to the Near and Middle East. Henderson, as Brands makes clear, displayed neither the intellectual fireworks of George F. Kennan nor the caution of Charles Bohlen, the two dominant State Department Soviet experts in whose shadow he served throughout his career. But Henderson exerted influence as a clear and unshakable advocate of global containment, as a man who reduced virtually all international events to the calculus of the East-West power struggle

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