1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs: The Election That Changed the Country by JamesChaceReview by: Walter Russell MeadForeign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2004), p. 172Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20034097 .

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in which American scholars have inter preted the end of the contest with the Soviet Union. Leo P. Ribuffo's critique of the competing but interconnected attempts of Reinhold Niebuhr, William

Appleton Williams, and John Lewis Gaddis to grapple with the moral basis of U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era is a serious and substantive accom plishment. "Papers of a Dangerous Tendency," a consideration of American communism by Maurice Isserman and Ellen Schrecker, begins as a disciplined and orderly retreat under fire but ulti

mately degenerates into a rout. Ac knowledging that the leadership of the American Communist Party was

more closely involved with Soviet intelligence and that more American communists committed acts of espionage than leftist historians had claimed, they gamely seek to limit the damage.

The effort mostly fails. They concede that American spies helped Stalin get the atom bomb more quickly than he otherwise would have and that early possession of the bomb encouraged him to back Kim I1 Sung's attack on South Korea, sparking a war that killed a million Koreans and 37,000 Americans, further militarized the U.S. approach to containment, prepared the way for

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1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs The Election That Changed the Country. BY JAMES CHACE. New York: Simon

& Schuster, 2004, 336 pp. $25.95. As the United States heads into a bitter presidential election, Chace provides an elegant and useful overview of one of the

most crucial such contests in our history: the 1912 race in which Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Progressive, William Howard

Taft as a Republican, Eugene V. Debs as a Socialist, and Woodrow Wilson as a

Democrat. Wilson won and went on to become the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson to serve two consecutive terms in the White House. For Chace, this was a tragedy. On both foreign and domestic policy, Roosevelt would have made a stronger, more effective leader and, in Chace's view, many of the achievements of the New Deal would have been real ized a generation earlier. One is struck, however, by the enduring conservatism of the American electorate. Taking the Taft vote and combining it with the conservative white Southerners who supported Wilson, it is not clear that even the 1912 election, often taken as a high-water mark in Progressive politics, showed a solid electoral majority for radical change.

The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of the New York Times. EDITED BY JAMES M. MCPHERSON. New York:

St. Martin's, 2004, 432 pp. $35.00. War reporting has been much in the news,

and this collection of New York Times reports from the Civil War shows the timeless nature of many of today's con troversies over war coverage. The Times consistently mishandled important

[172] FOREIGN AFFAIRS- Volume83No.s

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