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under examination, public investment was used to spur economic development.In considering two major New Deal agencies, the Public Works Administration(PWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the author downplaystheir failure to solve the problem of mass unemployment, concentratinginstead upon their positive achievements, in the form of public buildings andinfrastructure which provided a lasting and concrete manifestation of NewDeal liberalism. Although Smith concentrates upon the New Deal period, heargues that the work done by these two agencies provided a blueprint forworks programmes under the auspices of the Federal Works Agency during theSecond World War, although the goal of social welfare was replaced bynational security and military necessity. The book concludes with a briefchapter drawing attention to the significance of New Deal developments forpost-war growth, in the form of national highways and the military industrialcomplex.

Smith draws an impressive picture of the New Deal’s role in developing theinfrastructure of the United States (although more might have been said aboutthe work of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural ElectrificationAgency). However, he blurs the distinction between spending on public worksdone by the PWA, which relied on private contractors, and the work reliefperformed by the WPA, calling it an ‘unwarranted’ distinction (p. 3, n. 4). Theinterpretation of the WPA as a welfare measure that happened to produce someuseful by-products is dismissed: Smith sees it instead as a new works programmeset up in response to the PWA’s apparent slowness in taking people off theunemployment rolls. However, to understand the WPA it is important to see itin the context of the Social Security Act, which, by making provision for the‘unemployables’, allowed relief to become purely work relief, Harry Hopkins’spreferred method. Smith also assumes that the PWA was intended essentiallyto remedy the short-term effects of mass unemployment, and at this it failed:however, as its inclusion in the National Industrial Recovery Act demonstrated,it was viewed much more as an engine of economic recovery, which would primethe pump by its demands for material and equipment. Despite these caveats,however, this work makes a useful contribution to our understanding of thepolitics and administration of the PWA and the WPA, and the role of publicworks within the New Deal.

University of Essex

FIONA VENN

Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War

. By Robert L. Beisner.

Oxford UniversityPress. 2006. xiv + 800pp. £19.00/$35.00.

Henry Kissinger once wrote that Dean Acheson was ‘the greatest Secretaryof State in the twentieth century’. In Kissinger’s opinion, Acheson, togetherwith President Harry S. Truman, ‘ushered in the most creative period in thehistory of American foreign policy’. Robert L. Beisner, in the fullest treatmentto date of Acheson’s career in the state department, has produced an elegantlywritten and exhaustively researched study of one of the central personalities inthe early years of the cold war. Beisner has combed American and foreignarchives for new insights into US diplomacy in the immediate post-SecondWorld War period, synthesized the voluminous secondary literature on the coldwar and created a rounded portrait of Acheson’s policy-making style. Beisner

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brings Acheson’s world to life with vivid character sketches of the man himself,his friends, his allies and his adversaries (both domestic and foreign). Theauthor provides his readers with not only a brilliant biography of a significantAmerican statesman, but also a panoramic overview of the key events anddevelopments of the formative decade of the cold war.

Beisner argues that Acheson’s greatness as a policy-maker and diplomat owedmuch to his close relationship to President Harry Truman, his strategic vision ofbuilding ‘situations of strength’ to contain Soviet expansionism in Europe andsouth-east Asia, and his ability to forge a community of like-minded democraciesinto a formidable western alliance against international communism. Afterbecoming secretary of state in January 1949, Acheson, fully supported byTruman who came to share unreservedly his view of international relations,dominated American foreign policy. As Beisner points out, Acheson’s strategyof building situations of strength involved accumulating countervailing economic,political and military power to convince the Soviet Union of the west’s resolveand fortitude and limit Moscow’s risk-taking in Europe and the Pacific rim, thestrategic ‘hot spots’ of the cold war.

By and large this policy was successful in western Europe. In south-east Asiathe results of Acheson’s strategy were mixed. Despite integrating Japan into thewestern orbit, Acheson failed to deal effectively with the outbreak of conflict inKorea and the rise to power of the communists in China. His greatest contribution,however, was the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Through skilfuldiplomacy, Acheson reorganized the western European states into an effectivemilitary bulwark against the Soviet Union and paved the way for the FederalRepublic of Germany’s entry into NATO in 1955.

De Montfort University

IAN JACKSON

Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in America’s Cold War

.By John Hoerr.

University of Pittsburgh Press. 2005. xii + 311pp. $29.95.

Harry, Tom, and Father Rice

tells the story of the author’s one-timecongressman uncle Harry J. Davenport, union (United Electrical Workers, UE)stalwart Tom Quinn, and so-called ‘labour priest’, Father Charles Rice. Thenarrative is centred on the relationship between these three and local ‘radical’politics in Pittsburgh and as such would appeal to a fairly specialized audience.It shows the effects of the climate of incrimination and recrimination on ‘ordinary’people. From the outset Hoerr acknowledges that this is not an attempt tochange the way McCarthyism (broadly defined) is understood; instead it is aneffort to tell a previously untold story, to provide further illumination on this‘known history’ (p. ix). The author’s stated position means that knowledge ofthis period in American history is a prerequisite for appreciating this tale. Thisis very much a story, or perhaps in light of Hoerr’s journalistic background, aninvestigative report rather than a purely (perhaps narrowly defined) historicaltext.

The most problematic aspect of this book for the historian is its sources. It isheavily reliant on memory, interview and oral testimony, either of the author,family members or of the participants, Quinn in particular. The criteria forassessing the quality of memory as a source remain elusive and highly per-sonal. Possibly as a result of this the narrative is rather inward-looking and