David M. Watry, Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill and Eden in the Cold War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. 240 pp. $29.95

David Watry's short analysis is stark in its argument. Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill and Eden in the Cold War is built around the bleak premise that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an ideologically driven, risk-taking president who steered foreign policy away from the “inert and torpid” (p. 2) containment policy of his predecessor, toward a dangerous brinkmanship that was conspicuous across the piste of U.S. foreign policy during his years in office. This shift in U.S. policy, according to Watry, manifested itself in Eisenhower's nuclear arms policies, his covert initiatives, and his embrace of economic intervention, as well as in diplomacy more generally. The book is based on a wide reading of the plentiful U.S. and British secondary sources and on numerous private archival collections in both countries, although not upon a systematic trawl of the relevant state archive collections in either the United States or the United...