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Post by Michael on Apr 5, 2006 19:00:36 GMT -5
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Post by Michael on Feb 13, 2009 7:46:11 GMT -5
New Jersey History Book ReviewsPublished by H-New-Jersey@h-net.msu.edu (February 2006) Lloyd C. Gardner. The Case That Never Dies: The Lindbergh Kidnapping. Rutgers University Press, 2004. xi + 480 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8135-3385-6. Reviewed for H-New-Jersey by Marc Mappen, New Jersey Historical Commission
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Post by Michael on Jun 29, 2010 15:32:26 GMT -5
For the past 40 years, Lloyd Gardner has been among the most critical, insightful, and prolific analysts of 20th-century American foreign policy. Trained at Wisconsin under Fred Harvey Harrington, and part of a cohort of scholars who set out to revise traditional Cold War interpretations of American foreign policy, Gardner is nonetheless difficult to place in any particular "school" of interpretation or identify in terms of a particular era of foreign policy. Rather, he has produced more than a dozen books, touching on virtually every major aspect of American foreign policy in the last century, and contributed his own imaginative interpretation of each subject he has engaged. At the center of Gardner's work has been a willingness to take seriously what American policy makers said and did, rather than reduce them simply to spokespeople for economic interests or moralistic crusades. If he found Woodrow Wilson, Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, and Lyndon Johnson "architects of illusion," it was because he credited their power to create grand illusions, and teased out the tragedy when those illusions led their creators (and the American people) astray. His analysis in Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913–1923 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1984) of how Woodrow Wilson's intervention in Mexican politics prefigured his commitment of America to a European war and in Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1995) of how Lyndon Johnson's decisions on the Vietnam War grew from his New Deal liberalism are among the most significant interpretations of American foreign policy produced in the last half century.
In his years at Rutgers University, Gardner trained over three dozen graduate students and won the school's Warren Susman Award for distinguished undergraduate teaching. As an emeritus professor he continues to offer new courses, most recently a seminar on presidential lying and a lecture course on American Middle Eastern policies. His most recent book, a major reassessment of the Lindbergh kidnapping, is characteristic of the innovative way over his entire career that Lloyd Gardner has asked new questions and assessed issues of true significance in American public life.
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