In the Shadow of the Oval Office: Portraits of the National Security Advisers and thePresidents They Served—From JFK to George W. Bush by IVO H. DAALDER; I. M. DESTLERReview by: WALTER RUSSELL MEADForeign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 3 (May/June 2009), pp. 174-175Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20699586 .

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Recent Books

guide, a serious vulnerability. The period of transition begins during the long presidential campaign, as power ebbs

away from a lame-duck incumbent, and

it continues well past inauguration day, as the new administration struggles to make key appointments, get them con

firmed, and get its policies and procedures in order. The authors attribute the length of the process to two features of the U.S.

political system: the length of the cam

paign and the unusually large number of political policy jobs that change hands from one administration to the next.

(In most democracies, turnover in for

eign policy staff is restricted?perhaps the foreign minister and one or two top

posts change when the government

changes, but otherwise the bureaucracy carries on as before.) It is unlikely that this situation will change; Campbell and Steinberg offer suggestions on how

incoming administrations can make it

work better. Some of the suggestions seem

Utopian: make fewer dramatic campaign commitments in foreign policy, the authors

urge, noting the degree to which such

pledges often come back to haunt new

presidents and their staffs. But others seem

quite practical and helpful. One hopes that several copies of this book are circulating among senior Obama appointees?among whom both Campbell and Steinberg are now included.

security adviser through 50 tumultuous

years. The post is something of an

anomaly: although originally created as a pure staff position and exempt from the requirement of Senate confirmation, under some presidents the national secu

rity adviser has eclipsed the constitution

ally mandated cabinet officers to become, next to the president, the most powerful force in U.S. foreign policy. Commenta

tors and policymakers frequently deplore the often intense rivalries between na

tional security advisers and secretaries,

yet the rivalries emerge over and over

again. Daalder and Destler provide ex

amples, such as the George H. W. Bush

administration, in which the system worked well; they point to others, such as the Reagan administration, in which failures by the adviser left the president exposed to damaging political and policy failures. In recent years, a third force has

begun to appear in the executive branch; a series of powerful vice presidents,

including AI Gore, Dick Cheney, and now Joe Biden, have emerged, with

varying results, as partners and, occasion

ally, rivals to both the secretary of state

and the national security adviser. Over

all, the growth in the complexity of the

foreign policy machinery appears to reflect the continuing rise in the importance of foreign policy for U.S. presidents. The world is so large, its problems so

complex, and the constitutional role of

the president in foreign policy so power fill, that presidents have over time seemed

inexorably driven to expand the group of powerful aides who help shape foreign policy. Coordination among these usu

ally strong-willed, self-confident, and

brilliant aides poses problems of its own; building an appropriate system

In the Shadow of the Oval Office: Portraits

of the National Security Advisers and the Presidents They Served?From JFK to

George W.Bush, by ivo h. daalder

and i. m. destler. Simon and

Schuster, 2009, 400 pp. $27.00. In the Shadow of the Oval Office offers a

timely retrospective on the role of national

[174] FOREIGN AFFAIRS VoIume88No.j

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Recent Books

and managing the inevitable rivalries is one of the key challenges facing a new

president.

American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims From the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism, by thomas s. kidd. Princeton

University Press, 2008, 224 pp. $29.95. This concise and well-organized study offers readers an excellent summary of

American popular attitudes toward

Islam from the eighteenth century onward. Americans encountered Islam with less

baggage than, say, central Europeans, whose historical memories were haunted by the march of the Ottomans to the Danube and the sieges of Vienna. And for Ameri cans, a relatively unhistorical people with

little folk memory of, or religious sympathy for, the Crusades (seen by American Protestants as a Catholic aberration), Islam

never occupied the position of "the ancient

enemy," as it did in parts of Europe. Even so, as Kidd shows, Islam has cast a dark shadow over the American mind. Theolog ically, early American Christians saw Islam as "the Antichrist of the East," which they paired with "the Antichrist of the West"

(Roman Catholicism), and they searched the Scriptures for prophecies of Islams downfall. From the capture and enslave

ment of American sailors by the Barbary pirates, through the struggles among

Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the

declining decades of the Ottoman Empire, American Christians tended to view Islam

and its followers in increasingly negative terms. An important exception to this

trend is found among the American

missionaries who lived in the Middle East; although the missionaries regretted the fail ure of the Muslims to embrace the call of

Christ, they found themselves increasingly sympathetic to Islamic political aspirations and appreciative of the strengths of Islamic, as well as Arab and Persian, culture.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. by drew gilpin

faust. Knopf, 2008, 368 pp. $27.95. The sheer scale of the slaughter in the American Civil War?more than the total military deaths in all the rest of the United States* wars combined?

still overwhelms almost 150 years after the fact. Faust's painstakingly researched

account of the Civil War dead details how they died, what happened to their

bodies, how families received the news, how they mourned, and how the North and the South memorialized the slain.

Her careful recovery of detail contrasts

with the bare statistics of mass death to startle readers over and over into a fuller

recognition of the human dimension of this colossal and tragic conflict. Popular interest in U.S. history tends to shift between two stories: the relatively simple and triumphant narrative of the American

Revolution and the establishment of the Constitution and the darker and more

complex story of the Civil War. It

may be that after a period in which the Revolution and the Founding Fathers

spoke most directly to the nation, the

country is entering a period in which the somber figures of Abraham Lincoln,

Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh

Sherman, and Robert E. Lee best reflect

the concerns and hopes of a troubled time. If so, the extraordinary success of

Fausts unsparing account may end up

marking the moment when Civil War historians began to recapture the atten

tion of the reading public.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS May/June 2009 U75]

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