The job of writing a thorough study about once influential but now forgotten historical figures is always fraught with danger and best approached with trepidation, lest rancorous tensions and disagreements reemerge. The task becomes doubly difficult when examining the life and influence of a married couple whose intellectual journey from Trotskyism to neoconservatism coincided with the deep societal transformation of the United States from the 1930s to the 1980s—from an isolationist, institutionally racist society to a racially integrated, global superpower obsessed with the threat posed by its chief rival, the Soviet Union.
Yet just such an insightful work is exactly what Ron Robin has accomplished in The Cold World They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter. The book amply describes how, for roughly a decade from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, the Wohlstetters, through their writings and personalities, from their intellectual perch at the RAND Corporation,...