Session Abstract

          The history of U.S. foreign relations is nothing if not the study of lives. Such history examines which individuals made decisions, how and why decisions were made, and how they affected lives around the world. In past decades, this once-preeminent field sank into something of a methodological backwater. Frank Costigliola's Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton, 2012) offers a model for bringing unaccustomed analytical depth to the writing of foreign relations history. Costigliola contends, "Only by including the overlooked private lives of public statesmen, the emotional stakes of their diplomacy, and the cultural context of their ideology can we arrive at a more holistic picture  . . . [that] helps us see the messy way that history really happens" (p. 20) This proposal is for a roundtable to assess the wider applicability of his methodology.

            The book challenges a prevailing assumption in the historiography of foreign and international relations history: that leaders and diplomats making policy were overwhelmingly rational in their thinking as they pursued unambiguously objective national interests. The book builds on the work of William M. Reddy, Barbara H. Rosenwein, and other historians in examining culturally inflected emotions as a key category of historical analysis. Insecure pride, craving for respect, anxiety about change, fear of appearing fearful, as well as reactions of contempt and disgust – all these and other emotional attitudes shaped political perceptions. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances traces the foreign policy consequences of the personalities, personal lives, states of health, emotional beliefs, and sensibilities of Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and their principal advisers and intimates. Like these individuals, their nations exhibited distinctive – though not determining or unambiguous – emotional dispositions.

            At the critical juncture of history that was 1941-46, emotional dynamics helped shape the success of the wartime alliance and the rise of the Cold War that followed its demise. Interactions of gender identity was one such emotional dynamic conditioning the pressure-cooker environment at Yalta and other wartime conferences. Each of the Allied leaders displayed a gender identity somewhat at odds from the norms of masculinity in his country. With a hint of femininity, Roosevelt and Stalin (yes, the murderous dictator) charmed and seduced. Forever boyish, Churchill effervesced. Truman struggled with lifelong insecurities about his being a “sissy” and “a little man.” By exploring the intersections between personal and political relationships, this book brings new insights into a story that we thought we knew very well already: how key players put the World War II alliance together, how it operated, and why it fell apart.

            The roundtable's structure is as follows. Costigliola will read a pre-circulated paper. Then two senior scholars, Melvyn Leffler and Andrew Rotter, and two junior scholars, Anne Foster and Jenifer Van Vleck, will respond – Leffler and Rotter respectively through the lenses of national security and the senses, and Foster and Van Vleck by focusing on colonialism and technology. The chair, William Walker, will then guide further discussion.