Congress and the Cold War is by Robert David Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Looking back on the Cold War today, 15 years after the fall of the Soviet empire, a first-year college student might ask a professor, “What was that all about?” Indeed, even at the height of the nearly half-century struggle between East and West, there was an ongoing debate among foreign affairs experts over the origin, nature, and direction of the Cold War—a debate that continues today.

Robert David Johnson does not purport to resolve that debate, nor does he attempt a detailed history of the US Congress’ role in the Cold War. Instead he concentrates on instances in which Congress exercised its independent will to make or influence US Cold War policies. He aims to refute the commonly held notion that Congress was largely acquiescent to the US President during most of the Cold War. Johnson makes the important point that the conventional image of a supine Congress is based largely on abdications of its treaty and warmaking powers. To get the true picture, he argues, one must look at other ways in which Congress asserted itself to affect public opinion and national policymaking. Congress attached policy riders to spending bills, its subcommittees held hearings and investigations to scrutinize administration policies, and its individual members called attention to otherwise ignored problems or parts of the world and promoted new ways of looking at them.

A professor of history at Brooklyn College and author of The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Policy (1995) and Ernest Greuning and the American Dissenting Tradition (1998), Johnson does a masterful job of mining scores of archival collections, congressional debates, committee hearings and reports, and oral histories to put flesh—warts and all—on the many players who were a part of the debates of the Cold War era. He asserts there were two distinct groups of members who stood up for the powers and prerogatives of Congress during the Cold War period: the conservative “revisionists” in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the liberal “new internationalists” in the 1960s and 1970s.

Johnson calls the former group “revisionists” because “they claimed to desire a revision in Cold War liberalism,” focusing less on aiding capitalist democracies in Europe than on aiding those in East Asia and fighting communism at home. Their ranks included senators Robert Taft (R-OH), Pat McCarran (D-NV), Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), William Knowland (R-CA), and John Bricker (R-OH). The revisionists eventually overreached, Johnson writes, and a public backlash brought an end to their run around 1954 with the censure of McCarthy, the defeat of the Bricker amendment (which gave Congress sweeping new powers over foreign policy), and the death of McCarran. The “new internationalists,” on the other hand, wanted to change “the anti-communist ethos of the Cold War” that assisted dictatorial regimes, placed emphasis on military solutions using expensive new weapons, and overextended US military commitments abroad. The leading new internationalists included senators Eugene McCarthy (D-MN), J. William Fulbright (D-AR), Frank Church (D-IN), Harold Hughes (D-IA), and Stuart Symington (D-MO). Although they entered Congress in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they did not taste success until the late 1960s. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, they too had run out their string as a more conservative mood overtook the country and many of the liberals were defeated for re-election. Johnson does not disguise his own sympathies, which lie with the new internationalists.

Although the author’s purported aim is to show how Congress asserted itself during the Cold War even before its widely acknowledged (albeit brief) political resurgence in response to Vietnam and Watergate, only about half the book deals with the 1945 to 1968 period. Furthermore, much of that concerns failed attempts of the revisionists and new internationalists to make their marks on foreign and defense policies. Those who tried to assert independent congressional power were thwarted or co-opted from 1945 to 1948 by the bipartisan foreign policy consensus forged by US President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This liberal internationalist establishment helped establish the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Marshall Plan, the National Security Act (which set up the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and unified military), and the Truman “Containment Doctrine.” The foreign aid revolt of 1963, on the other hand, can be counted a mixed success for both sides. Conservatives like Representative Otto Passman (D-LA) and liberals such as Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK) joined forces for entirely different reasons to hobble US President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress with reduced funding and policy restrictions.

The remainder of the book features the rise of the new internationalists. Their first challenges to Nixon’s policies in Southeast Asia came in two amendments by US senators John Sherman Cooper (R-KY) and Frank Church (D-ID) in late 1969 and early 1970 which prohibited the introduction of US combat troops into Thailand or Laos and then, after Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia, cut off funds for combat operations in that country. Both amendments were adopted by the Senate, only to be dropped later by the House. War critics in the Senate followed with a Hatfield-McGovern amendment in early 1970 to cut off funds for all military operations in Vietnam except those necessary to withdraw troops. The Senate rejected the amendment, 55 to 39, but on August 15, 1973, Congress passed a law cutting off funding for US military operations in Indochina. What Johnson does not make entirely clear is that this action came after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January and with Nixon’s acquiescence under protest. That same year, Congress passed the War Powers Act over Nixon’s veto—an act every president since has declared unconstitutional.

Johnson extensively accounts the new internationalists’ efforts to eliminate or curtail various weapons systems. New internationalists pushed a dizzying array of amendments to defense and foreign assistance bills that challenged administration weapons systems and military policies during Richard Nixon’s presidency. The new internationalists also unsuccessfully tried to thwart Nixon’s request to develop Safeguard, a reconfigured anti-ballistic missile defense system (ABM). Johnson writes it was a “Pyrrhic victory” for the Administration because it set the stage for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement (SALT I). This would curb ABM systems on both sides. More important, it emboldened defense critics to offer amendments over ensuing years aimed at stopping various weapons systems and curtailing military aid to right-wing military dictatorships.