First published in 2006 and now reissued in a paperback edition, this useful book, well suited for classroom use, gives us both less and more than its title implies. A collection of Robert Ferrell's reflections on the Truman administration published from 1972 to 2002, it takes its name from an initial chapter on Cold War revisionists, then segues to chapters on the nuclear bomb, the early Cold War, Korea, and the historiography on Harry S. Truman.
Ferrell's critique of the revisionists is restrained and gentlemanly. He calls the father of the genre, University of Wisconsin historian William Appleman Williams, a friend. He shrinks from describing as Marxist the far-fetched assertion by Williams that the central theme of U.S. foreign policy was a perpetual quest for “Open Door” markets. Indeed Ferrell almost seems to buy Williams's implausible declaration that the Open Door interpretation was simply an adaptation of Frederick Jackson Turner's...