Instrumental to my understanding of Gen. Creighton Abrams was the work of Lewis Sorley, most especially his book Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times. Robert Timberg’s The Nightingale’s Song provided important insight on the breach between civilian and soldier that cracked open during the Vietnam War. Also helpful was Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.
Lyndon B. Johnson’s taped conversation with Sen. Richard Russell on July 26, 1965, is available at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Presidential Recordings Program. It’s accessible online, and well worth listening to, even just for fun. (The same archive also includes the amazing tape of LBJ ordering pants to be delivered to the White House—someone should have made that into a ringtone by now.) Also available there is the April 18, 1971, recording of Nixon discussing Abrams with Henry Kissinger.
The specifics of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s visit to President Gerald Ford’s White House are found in Memorandum of Conversation, Monday, April 14, 1975, declassified in 1992 and available online at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Digital Library. Other details come from A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford.
Chapter 2: A Nation at Peace Everywhere in the World
In understanding Ronald Reagan’s life and politics I was greatly aided by Edmund Morris’s authorized biography, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, as well as Lou Cannon’s books, including Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power; Reagan; and President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. Particularly helpful on Reagan’s experience in World War II was Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics, by Stephen Vaughn. I also drew from Reagan’s autobiography, An American Life.
Contemporaneous coverage by the New York Times and Time magazine provided nice color to the story of the 1976 Republican presidential primaries.
On the politics of the Panama Canal in the late 1970s, I benefited from and highly recommend Adam Clymer’s Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right. Also helpful was William F. Buckley’s The Reagan I Knew. The text of Reagan’s “To Restore America” speech is available at the Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library Archives. Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America was a useful source not only for the text of Reagan’s radio broadcasts, but for his own thinking.
For Reagan’s Fum-Poo experience, Rear Gunner and Winning Your Wings, among others, are watchable via YouTube.
The text of President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 speech “Crisis of Confidence” is available at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
The text quoted from “A Soldier’s Faith” is found in An Address by Oliver Wendell Holmes Delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895, at a Meeting Called by the Graduating Class of Harvard University (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1895). Louis Menand’s insightful book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America was of great help in understanding Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the way he was shaped by his experiences in the Civil War.
The John Travolta Army recruiting ad is available on YouTube, as are the “Be All That You Can Be” commercials—putting them side by side makes for a dissonant but interesting comparison. The U.S. Army’s Transition to the All-Volunteer Force, 1968–1974, by Robert K. Griffith Jr.; I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force, by Bernard Rostker; and “The Army in the Marketplace: Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force” (Journal of American History 4, vol. 1, June 2007) by Beth Bailey provided good color on recruiting and advertising.
Edmund Morris and Lou Cannon were again helpful in understanding Reagan’s first presidential term, as was Steven F. Hayward’s The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980– 1989. I am indebted to Richard Reeves, especially, for his book President Reagan: Triumph of Imagination. His reporting provided much detail on Martin Treptow, David Stockman, and Alexander Haig, among others. David Sirota’s book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything is a great reference for anybody who wants to understand that strange time.
If you have a few days to spare, you can view the entirety of Ronald Reagan’s testimony in the John Poindexter criminal trial via YouTube. Nicholas Goncharoff testified about Lenin to the United States Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws on July 15, 1954.
For information and analysis of Team B, I relied on its own words in Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis. Soviet Strategic Objectives: An Alternative View. Report of Team “B” (US Central Intelligence Agency, 1976). I was also informed by Anne Hessing Cahn’s Killing Detente and her 1993 article (with John Prado) “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; as well as former CIA analyst Willard C. Matthias’s candid book America’s Strategic Blunders: Intelligence Analysis and National Security, 1936–1991.
The 1980s-era editions of Soviet Military Power make for sometimes terrifying and sometimes humorous reading, but read them with a counterpoint guide at hand: Tom Gervasi’s Soviet Military Power: The Pentagon’s Propaganda Document, Annotated and Corrected.
More than you’d guess has been written about the very quick and very jumbled combat operations in Grenada. For the soldiers’ views of both the planning and the execution of the invasion I was aided by the memoirs of Capt. Robert Gormly, Col. John T. Carney, and command master CPO Dennis Chalker; journalistic accounts from Orr Kelly, as well as a richly detailed section of Rick Atkinson’s The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966; and by The Rucksack War, something of an official history—great for timeline—by Edgar F. Raines Jr. Raines also wrote “The Interagency Process and the Decision to Intervene in Grenada,” which is more compelling reading than the title might suggest.
US-Grenada Relations: Revolution and Intervention in the Backyard, by Gary Williams, was helpful in seeing the wider story. Also a worthwhile read is Eastern Caribbean Regional Security Policy (NSC-NSDD-105), National Security Decision Directives, Reagan Administration, available online or from the Ronald Reagan Library.
The domestic political scene was well covered by major newspapers and magazines at the time, and I benefited from that coverage, but I was also aided by Tip O’Neill’s autobiography, Man of the House, and Reagan’s own autobiography, as well as his White House diaries, which are available in the Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library archives as well as in the book The Reagan Diaries.
