More than a half-century ago, the Cornell Daily Sun interviewed me as an exemplar of a graduating senior with no idea of what to do for the remainder of his/her life. I don’t think I ever knew, and I certainly don’t remember, why and how the reporter chose to feature me. Yet the article’s premise was not wrong. My father had been an attorney, and although I felt no great attraction to the profession, by default it seemed the most likely career path for me to follow. I reflexively decided to major in political science (government at Cornell) because friends and family told me it was appropriate. Besides, the government department at Cornell had a sterling reputation (I was ignorant of its politics). I never changed my major. To do so required more effort than I was willing to expend.
H-Diplo Essay 220
Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
23 April 2020
“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”
https://hdiplo.org/to/E220
Series Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii
Essay by Richard H. Immerman, Temple University
More than a half-century ago, the Cornell Daily Sun interviewed me as an exemplar of a graduating senior with no idea of what to do for the remainder of his/her life. I don’t think I ever knew, and I certainly don’t remember, why and how the reporter chose to feature me. Yet the article’s premise was not wrong. My father had been an attorney, and although I felt no great attraction to the profession, by default it seemed the most likely career path for me to follow. I reflexively decided to major in political science (government at Cornell) because friends and family told me it was appropriate. Besides, the government department at Cornell had a sterling reputation (I was ignorant of its politics). I never changed my major. To do so required more effort than I was willing to expend.
That last sentence speaks volumes about my attitude toward my studies as an undergraduate. My two passions were riding motorcycles and cooking (I frequently missed class to watch “The Galloping Gourmet”). Few of my government courses excited me. When I figured out that I could take a semester’s leave of absence and still graduate in four years, I jumped at the opportunity. In spring of my junior year I drove my beat-up VW bug from Ithaca to Tucson, Arizona, where I stayed with a friend and read the books that I didn’t have time for while taking courses.
By then I was far more certain about what careers I wanted to avoid than those I might pursue. I did seriously consider becoming a high school social studies teacher, and not so that I could avoid the draft. My favorite teacher in high school taught World Cultures and Advanced Placement (AP) European History. He assigned Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and other books that made learning fun as well as stimulating. I considered following in his footsteps—until I took the course in social studies methods required for certification that was taught at Ithaca High School. The instructor stressed that the primary responsibility of a secondary school teacher was to instill discipline. This was a time when I reflexively questioned authority; he failed me on my philosophy of education. I rejected another career option.
I committed myself unreservedly, however, to two components of my undergraduate experience. The first was protesting the Vietnam War. My brother had preceded me in attending college. Having started at Berkeley in 1964, he kept me up to date on the happenings around Sproul Hall and sent me readings that I would never encounter in my classes—Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, among those that I remember.[1] I wrote my senior history paper on why the United States should not be in Vietnam.
I arrived at Cornell the month before the 1967 March on the Pentagon. I did not go, but one of my teaching assistants did. We talked about it afterward even as he lent me his dog-eared copy of Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long.[2] By my second semester, the campus had become much more politically active, and so had I. By the next year, so had everyone, it seemed. Many of us took George Kahin’s course on Vietnam that fall. I had become familiar with Kahin while researching my paper in high school, and the book he co-authored with John Lewis in 1967, The United States in Vietnam, a trenchant criticism of the war, had received extensive attention on campus.[3] Kahin’s was the one government course I thoroughly enjoyed; he became my advisor.
Kahin in fact taught history, which differentiated his course from virtually all the government courses I took (Eldon Kenworthy’s course on Latin America was another exception, but I didn’t take that until I was a senior). Nevertheless, it was not until I enrolled in a ‘real’ history course that I came to understand that the discipline mattered no less than the subject. That course was taught by Walter LaFeber, and it was the second dimension of my undergraduate experience to which I committed myself unreservedly—and zealously.
All readers of this essay are familiar with Walter LaFeber, and most with his legendary course on the History of U.S. Foreign Policy. Frank Costigliola and Andy Rotter, my soulmates through much of my career, wrote about it in Diplomatic History.[4] Still, to appreciate fully that course (a two-semester sequence divided at 1914; I took History 384, the second half, first), you really did have to be there, along with the hundreds of others who trekked up to Bailey Hall every Tuesday, Thursday, and, yes, Saturday (at 11:15 a.m.). You could not be late, because invariably a couple minutes before the scheduled start time, Walt would walk out onto the stage, put an outline up on the blackboard (no smart classes in those days), begin his lecture, follow the outline to a T for the next 50 minutes, and end precisely on time. We all hung on his every word, continuously conflicted between listening, and feverishly taking notes. Walt essentially concluded the course with the Korean War, but we were all presentists. Our frame of reference was the Vietnam War.
I cannot exaggerate how powerfully that course resonated with me, and not just in the classroom. In the evenings we read William Appleman Williams’s Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Walt’s own America, Russia, and the Cold War, and the contending essays by Lloyd Gardner, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Hans Morganthau on the Cold War’s origins.[5] We also read Vladimir Lenin, John Hobson, and Joseph Schumpeter on imperialism.[6] After class many of us would walk back to the Temple of Zeus in Goldwin Smith Hall, where over coffee we would talk about the questions that Walt provoked us to think about. To me it always came back to the ones that Williams asked: How could a nation do so much harm in the name of doing good? How could the United States deny that it was an empire, or at the very least, profess that it was a benevolent one? I spent decades trying to approximate that course in my own teaching, although I don’t delude myself by thinking that I even came close. Yet it remained my lodestar, and years later it was the motivation for my writing Empire for Liberty.[7]
But I am getting ahead of myself. Walt inspired me, but even he could not provide sufficient impetus for me to switch my major or take my other courses more seriously. I took the first half of his survey and a sampling of other history courses. Because I skipped an entire semester, however, and because I wanted to take courses in comparative literature (the historical novel among them, of course), in philosophy (Hegel to Marx), in sociology and the history of art, and other disciplines, I missed out on taking many. And there were still motorcycles to ride, meals to cook, and most importantly, a war to end. As I explained to that Cornell Daily Sun reporter, by my senior year I honestly had not given much thought to life after graduation.
Over the subsequent decades I frequently joked to my students that my career trajectory confirmed the truth of that John Lennon line, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” I would add the qualification, however, that I was not making any plans at all, except for travelling around Europe on a motorcycle. I skipped graduation to begin my adventure. It ended just short of three months later in the Lake District of England, where my bike (a Norton Commando for anyone interested) encountered a car on a winding road. Several weeks later with a shattered leg, I returned home, where I spent about six months recovering. I anticipated driving a taxi, which I had done periodically throughout college, once I was back on my feet, literally. In the meantime, I read Garry Wills’s Nixon Agonistes, Isaac Deutcher’s trilogy on Trotsky, and much more—and for the first time began to think seriously about the future.[8]
Then I received a visitor—a friend from Cornell who had dropped out for a while to protest the war and travel to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. During his last year he had worked himself to the bone in order to raise his grades sufficiently to gain admission to graduate school. He had succeeded, and while I recovered from my accident, he began at Rutgers, studying with my soon-to-be good friend Lloyd Gardner. Without any prompting on my part, he suggested that I go back to school. My reaction: Why not? I had surprised myself by enjoying my last year of courses so much. This time I could study history, remedying the mistake I had made as an undergraduate. What is more, I didn’t have a better idea.
So I filled out applications, only to schools in Boston. The location was critical to my decision—as was the funding I received. Boston College gave me the most. BC also provided a campus for my dog to run free, as he had at Cornell. My priorities had not changed entirely. I could work with Frank Graff, who had studied with Walt at Cornell as an undergraduate and then received his Ph.D. at Michigan with Bradford Perkins. I decided that would be a fertile intellectual mix.
I loved graduate school far beyond what I imagined. As if determined to make up for my fallow undergraduate years, I never worked so hard in my life. I didn’t even mind when, my second semester, the professor who taught my U.S. history colloquium insisted that I write my required historiographic essay on Herbert Hoover as a cure for my “revisionist” predispositions (he’d obviously never read Williams on Hoover). I made life-long friends, all of whom remain intellectual partners.
Yet I also lived the life of an outlier, and as I came to appreciate later, that situation, or condition, influenced my career powerfully. My closest friends in graduate school—Chester Dunning, Arch Getty, and Bill Chase—studied Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union. My closest Americanist and office mate, Alex Bloom, did social and intellectual history. As a historian of U.S. foreign relations, I was largely on my own. Then, shortly after I passed my exams, Frank Graff died. I was devastated. I was also advisor-less.
In my readings I had learned from Richard Barnet and David Horowitz (yes, that David Horowitz) about the 1954 CIA operation in Guatemala.[9] Stunned that I had not learned about it in Walt’s class, I chose it for my second seminar paper. Relying for my sources primarily on newspaper accounts, I managed to piece together an original story. My plan was to develop it as my dissertation. But Frank had died, and I received no encouragement from others on my faculty. None of them knew much about the episode, and when I explained the reason for my interest, they poured cold water on it. Shouldn’t I write about Vietnam, they asked, or maybe something to do with nuclear weapons? I’d never get a job writing about Guatemala, especially because I’d never gain access to the necessary archives. I switched dissertation topics. There was no study of Alvee Adee, who had served as a senior official in the State Department from the 1880s to the 1920s. My premise was that he was the hidden hand behind America’s rise to globalism.
Of course he wasn’t. Moreover, my heart remained with the Cold War. Listening to it and not my faculty, I decided to roll the dice and write about the CIA and Guatemala. I also showed up at Arnie Offner’s doorstep—literally, his home, not his office at Boston University. I had only met Arnie once, but he knew Frank. He wanted to help. In addition, his interests had moved from World War II to the Cold War (he was beginning his project on Truman[10]), so the topic intrigued him. To my delight, Arnie agreed to serve on my committee and, albeit unofficially, my advisor. He told me to get to work.
I did, and about 18 months later returned to Arnie’s house with a complete draft. I’m sure we had had some communications in the interim, but not many. Yet because of skilled archivists like Erwin Mueller and Dennis Bilger at the Truman Library, David Haight and Jim Leyerzapf at the Eisenhower Library, and the redoubtable Sally Marks at the National Archives, I had found mountains of documents. Through the New York Times I had located Howard Hunt and, borrowing the air fare from friends, flown to Florida to interview him. Richard Bissell, Sproule Braden, and others were easier to find and to reach. What I gave Arnie was typed on legal pads and edited with rubber cement. He read it with exceptional care and offered many criticisms. When at my public defense several faculty charged that gaping holes remained in my evidence, Arnie defended me. I can never repay the debt I owe him
I had rushed the defense because, to my great surprise, several months after receiving Arnie’s feedback I received a job offer. I had given up hope of finding anything for the following year. I had even almost rented a space for the purpose of experimenting with an idea I had—opening a bookstore with a built-in café. Imagine that in 1978—Barnes & Noble began selling coffee in the early 1990s; Borders, shortly before. It never happened. Arch Getty had read an advertisement placed by Fred Greenstein at Princeton for a research assistant to work on a project comparing the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies. The job has your name written all over it, Arch told me matter-of-factly, and he was apparently right. Fred hired me in June, I defended in July, and I moved to Princeton in August.
Fred changed my world. Over the course of that first year (1978-79), he arranged with Princeton to “promote” me to associate director of the Presidency Studies Program, composed of Fred and myself. I now could almost make a living wage. Moreover, as a political scientist with few if any peers as a scholar of the presidency and pioneer in political psychology, Fred exposed me to an entire new literature and set of questions. What expertise I had on Eisenhower was limited—a serendipitous consequence of his having given the greenlight to Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954. He, along with his leadership style and advisory organization, morphed into my primary focus.
Thus during the three years I worked with Fred, I became a leading authority on the Eisenhower presidency—and more by circumstance than design, a cutting-edge Ike “revisionist.” I returned to Abilene where, according to the Eisenhower Library staff, I set the record for the most photocopies. I took one of Fred’s seminars (his pipedream was for me to receive a second Ph.D. in political science) and wrote a paper, “Eisenhower and Dulles: Who Made the Decisions?” Encouraged by Fred, I presented it at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Society. It became my first publication.[11] At Princeton Fred introduced me to Marty Sherwin. We became fast friends, and Marty introduced me to SHAFR, which I immediately joined and began to attend the annual meetings. I don’t think I have missed 10 in the subsequent 40-plus years. From Abilene David Haight sent me unsolicited the draft finding guide to the transcripts of the Dulles telephone transcripts. As a result, I was the first person to use them. While writing my dissertation I figured out how to use the Freedom of Information Act. It took about four years, but I succeeded in prying loosing thousands of pages of previously classified documents. Jointly with Fred and by myself, moreover, I interviewed dozens and dozens of Eisenhower’s friends and veterans of his two terms in office. I used this new material to revise my dissertation from beginning to end as well as publish a second article.[12]
By the time, my three- year contract at Princeton expired, I had signed a contract to publish The CIA and Guatemala. I experienced a snafu when my soon-to-be wife, Marion, surprised me by gathering up the countless small piles of index cards (yes, index cards) strewn throughout my apartment and neatly reassembling them in three piles of almost exactly the same height. There was a silver lining to the extra time I needed to return my notes to their original state. My book came out almost concurrently with Fred’s on Eisenhower.[13]
I cannot exaggerate how fortunate I was that Fred hired me when he did. And his was the gift that kept on giving. When I hit the job market again in 1981, I could locate not a single tenure-track position in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations. I found a one-year appointment to replace Bob Schulzinger at the University of Colorado. The next year I moved to the University of Hawaii, where I could and did receive tenure. Because email was becoming a thing, nevertheless, I could continue to work closely with Fred. We co-authored an article and collaborated on a book.[14] I also co-authored an article with George Herring, whom I had invited to Princeton in connection with the work I was doing with Fred on Eisenhower and Indochina (George had “reciprocated” by inviting me to his home in Kentucky to look through his files).[15] In addition, Fred had brought to my attention a two-year fellowship offered by the MacArthur Foundation and the Social Science Research Council to train in a cognate discipline which would inform a new research project. If I received it, I could return to Princeton to study political psychology under his guidance and that of Bob Jervis, to whom Fred introduced me, and launch a new project on Eisenhower. I could also organize a conference to celebrate Princeton alumnus John Foster Dulles’s 100th birthday. All that came to fruition and culminated with my editing the resultant volume of essays, commuting to Columbia to take seminars with Bob, and developing a truly interdisciplinary approach to my scholarship. [16]
It also culminated with my co-authoring Waging Peace with Robert Bowie.[17] Bob, who as Dulles’s assistant secretary of state had succeeded George Kennan and Paul Nitze as Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and represented the department on the National Security Council’s Planning Board, had been among the first of the administration’s principals whom Fred and I had interviewed. That interview had proven so informative, particularly from my perspective as a historian of U.S. foreign relations, that I had followed up with him over the phone and then brought him back to Princeton for a second time. Bob had also been among the first of Dulles’s former assistants, advisors, and associates whom I had invited to the centennial conference that I organized at Princeton in 1988.[18] At the conference I chaired a collective oral history on the Solarium exercise in strategic planning. Joining Bowie were two members of Solarium’s task forces, George Kennan and retired General Andrew Goodpaster. By then Bob and I had developed a close relationship. He proposed that we write a book together—on Solarium.
I hesitated to accept. Bob was brilliant, and although trained as a lawyer, as the founding director of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs and the author of a book on the Suez crisis and several book chapters, he had established his scholarly bona fides. Further, not only did he have special access to otherwise inaccessible documents, but he also could provide me with insights I could never glean from the documents alone. That was the crux of my problem. Bob was famous for his strong beliefs and capacity to argue on behalf of them forcefully; precisely because of these attributes Dulles brought him to Foggy Bottom in the first place. My previous co-authors had been Fred, George, and Gary Hess. I could not and still cannot recall one significant dispute among us. Bob Bowie, however, had advised John Foster Dulles. I was certain we’d have serious disagreements over not just interpretation but perhaps even ‘ground truth’—even if I had archival evidence to support my position. I vividly remember Bob eviscerating one of Ernest May’s ABDs at a workshop at Harvard. She cited myriad documents to tell the story of the European Defense Community. Bob complemented her on her scholarship and then tore her arguments apart.
I tried to square the circle with a proposal of my own. I suggested we list the prospective book’s authors as Richard Immerman with Robert Bowie. Bob would not hear of it. So I consented to co-authorship, and it ranks with returning to graduate school and going to work with Fred Greenstein at the very top of my life decisions. It took us close to a decade to complete the project, and during that time I spent many weekends with Bob and his wife Teddy, both at their apartment in Washington and home in Easton, Maryland. Sometimes I brought along Marion and my children. In this most cordial of environments, Bob and I would argue, often vigorously. I probably lost more than I won, but I won quite a few. No less important, I learned exponentially more than I possibly could have by relying solely on my personal research. A book initially intended to focus on Solarium grew into something larger. Neither of us was totally satisfied; to end when we did, without analyzing how the New Look changed over time, did not do justice to Eisenhower’s “enduring Cold War strategy,” we agreed. I worried that I had pulled too many of my punches. But ten years was enough, and we felt confident we had made a contribution.
I followed Waging Peace with a biography of Dulles in part to fill in some of the blanks that Bob and I left.[19] Yet if I am honest with myself, Eisenhower sustained my interest for so long because he remained an enigma to me. When I titled my Bernath lecture “Confessions of an Eisenhower Revisionist,” I was admitting that I wrestled with questions about Eisenhower’s conduct of foreign affairs that continually puzzled me.[20]
They still do, but I decided to leave it to others to find the answers that eluded me. It was not a difficult decision, but as with so many of mine, it was aided by circumstance. I never identified myself as anything other than a historian of US foreign relations. My interest in Eisenhower was a product of my study of US policy toward Guatemala in the early Cold War. My interest in the CIA was likewise the product of that study. I had not foreseen the circumstances that would provide opportunities for me to build on those interests. Yet they arose, and I took them.
The line between The CIA and Guatemala and my writings on Eisenhower is short and direct. Not so for the CIA; it took about a quarter-century and perhaps America’s greatest strategic blunder. I had dabbled a bit in intelligence history during this interval. Because so few other historians did, I’d received a few invitations to write an essay, review a book, or provide commentary at a conference. But then came George W. Bush, allegations of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. My years of examining the architecture of decision-making provoked questions that I was compelled to address: What role did intelligence play? Did it matter more or less to Bush than his predecessors? Did it matter to any of them? As the intelligence community grew since the end of World War II, did its influence grow commensurately? I decided to explore these questions with a SHAFR audience.[21]
Even as I did, my career took another turn, and one that was no more planned than earlier ones. Once again, my friends were pivotal contributors. Only months before the June 2007 SHAFR meeting, I received a phone call from Nancy Tucker. Nancy, who would tragically pass away not too l long afterward, and I had been close for years; now, rather than invite me to dinner, she was asking whether I would consider succeeding her as Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Integrity and Standard and Ombudsman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Taken completely off guard, my first reaction was to laugh and then, after allowing a decent interval, to decline. I had just completed 7.5 years as my department’s chair at Temple and a semester’s fellowship in London. I yearned to return to normalcy. But Marion insisted that I consider it seriously. If I didn’t, she lectured me, I’d never forgive myself. So I went to Langley for an interview with my future boss, Tom Fingar. I came away eager to work with him on what he convinced me would be valuable national service. Less than two months after I spoke at SHAFR, I Entered onto Duty (EOD) at ODNI.
My stint as an ADDNI (I am purposely throwing around acronyms so you can get a better idea of the job) was among the most rewarding and exciting chapters of my career. I can only hope that more and more of us who write and teach the kind of history that we do receive similar opportunities to experience what we study. That experience, coupled with the preparation of my SHAFR address, not only revived my interest in the CIA but also prompted me to write a book about it.[22] I cannot say for certain that I would have written that book had I rejected the ODNI offer. I can say for certain that had I rejected the offer, I would have written a very different book.
To me, then, my career, from serendipitous beginning to end, whenever that comes, is about people. Walt, Arnie, my graduate school friends, Fred, Marty, George, Bob Bowie, Bob Jervis, Nancy, Tom Fingar, Frank, Andy, Lloyd, Mel Leffler, Jeff Engel, Tom Zeiler, and Petra Goedde, and so many others whom I could also name, have offered me advice, opportunities, encouragement, and no less important, friendship. Those undergraduate days when I had no idea what my next move should be seem a lifetime ago. Before it was too late I learned to listen, and I was lucky to have found so many wonderful people to listen to.
Richard H. Immerman is Professor and Edward Buthusiem Distinguished Faculty Fellow in History Emeritus and Emeritus Marvin Wachman Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University. He is a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and recipient of its Stuart Bernath Book and Lecture Prizes and Peter Hahn Distinguished Service Award. His books include The CIA and Guatemala (The University of Texas Press, 1982), John Foster Dulles (Scholarly Resources, 1999), Empire for Liberty (Princeton University Press, 2010), and The Hidden Hand (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). He has also co-authored Waging Peace with Robert Bowie and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of the Cold War with Petra Goedde. Immerman served as an Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence from 2007-2009, held the Francis Deserio Chair in Strategic Intelligence at the US Army War College from 2013-2016, has chaired the Historical Advisory Committee to the Department of State and SHAFR’s Historical Documentation Committee since 2010, and currently chairs the American Historical Association’s Committee on Relations with NARA.
[1] Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); and Richard J. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1964). I have inferred the edition for this citation and many others that follow.
[2] Richard Farina, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (New York: Random House, 1966).
[3] George McTurnin Kahin and John Wilson Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York: Dial Press, 1967).
[4] Andrew J. Rotter and Frank Costigiola, “Walter LaFeber: Scholar, Teacher, Intellectual,” Diplomatic History 28 (November 2004): 625-635.
[5] William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, Dell, 1962); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966 (New York: Wiley, 1967); and Lloyd C. Gardner, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Hans Morgenthau, The Origins of the Cold War (Waltham: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970).
[6] John A. Hobson, Imperialism, A Study (New York: James Pott, 1902); V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939); and Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, tr. Heinz Norden (Cleveland and New York: Meridian, 1966).
[7] Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
[8] Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969); Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky, The Prophet Armed: 1871-1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954)); Trotsky: The Prophet Unarmed, 1921-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Trotsky: The Prophet Unarmed, 1929-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
[9] Richard J. Barnet, Intervention and Revolution: The United States in the Third World (New York and Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1968); and David Horowitz, The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971).
[10] Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
[11] Immerman, “Eisenhower and Dulles: Who Made the Decisions?” Political Psychology I (Autumn 1979): 21-38.
[12] Immerman, “Guatemala as Cold War History,” Political Science Quarterly 95 (Winter 1980-1981): 629-653. As a lesson in never give up, Diplomatic History rejected this article twice.
[13] Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1982); and Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
[14] Fred I. Greenstein and Immerman, “What Did Eisenhower Tell Kennedy about Indochina? The Politics of Misperception,” The Journal of American History 79 (September 1992): 568-587; and Fred I. Greenstein and John Burke, with Larry Berman and Immerman, How Presidents Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965, New York: Russell Sage, 1989).
[15] George C. Herring and Immerman, “Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dienbienphu: The ‘Day We Didn’t Go to War Revisited,’” The Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 343-363.
[16] Immerman, ed., John Foster Dulles, and the Diplomacy of the Cold War: A Reappraisal, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
[17] Robert R. Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[18] I organized the conference so that a veteran of Dulles’s State Department, other government official, or personal acquaintance of the secretary would comment on a scholarly presentation or otherwise offer insights on the administration’s foreign policies. This was a heady as well as informative experience for someone as young as I was at that time, and I called on many of them in later years. In addition to Bowie, participants included Robert Amory, Tapley Bennet, Herny Brandon, Herbert Brownell, Hodding Carter, C. Douglas Dillon, David Eisenhower. Alan Emory, Robert Fearey, Andrew Goodpaster, John Hanes, U. Alexis Johnson, George Kennan, Phyllis Macomber, William Macomber, Ross Mark, David Newsom, Warren Rogers, Gerard Smith, David Waters, and Burke Wilkinson.
[19] Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in US Foreign Policy (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999).
[20] Immerman, “Confessions of an Eisenhower Revisionist: An Agonizing Reappraisal,” Diplomatic History 14 (Summer 1990): 319-342.
[21] Immerman, “Intelligence and Strategy: Historicizing Psychology, Politics, and Policy,” Diplomatic History 32 (January 2008): 1-23.
[22] Immerman, The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).