Part 2 Annotated further reading guide

Cold War: Crises and Change, 1953–63

On Eisenhower:

S. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President, 1952–1969 (Allen & Unwin, London, 1984).
Robert R. Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998).
Robert Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (Oxford University Press, New York, 1981).
Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New Look National Security Policy (Macmillan, London, 1996).
Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s secret propaganda battle at home and abroad (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 2006).

For a favourable and revisionist view of his Cold War strategy:

Robert R. Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998).
R. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (Oxford University Press, New York, 1981).
S. Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New Look National Security Policy (Macmillan, London, 1996).

For critical views of his Cold War strategy and a more precise understanding of Cold War fighting:

Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union 1945–1956 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999).
Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc 1947–1956 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2000).
John W. Young, Winston Churchill’s Last Campaign: Britain and the Cold War, 1951–5 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996).

On Churchill and early ideas of detente:

John W. Young, Winston Churchill’s Last Campaign: Britain and the Cold War, 1951–5 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996).
Klaus Larres, Churchill’s Cold War (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002).

For Khrushchev:

V. Zubok and C. Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996).
W. J. Thompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (Macmillan, Basingstoke, l995).
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (Norton, New York, 2006).
William Taubman, Nikita Khrushchev: the man and his era (Norton, New York, 2003).

On Kennedy, which has important material on the crises and on Khrushchev:

M. Beschloss, Kennedy v. Khrushchev: the Crisis Years, 1960–1963 (Faber & Faber, London, 1991).
Nigel Ashton, Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002).
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars (Oxford University Press, 2000).
James Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 2006).
Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy (Little, Brown, Boston, 2003).

There are some interesting articles on the Kennedy years in:

T. G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory (Oxford University Press, New York, 1989).
D. B. Kunz (ed.), The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade American Foreign Relations during the 1960s (Columbia University Press, New York, 1994).
Mark White (ed.), Kennedy: the New Frontier Revisited (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998).

The crucial Cold War element in this period is to ensure that books and articles are read that base their analyses on distinguishing between Cold War and Hot War and to realize that the campaign against the Soviet Union and communism on the one hand, and communism’s support for and involvement in revolutionary movements on the other, were different from the attempts to avoid the catastrophe of Hot War and settling US–Soviet disputes. For material relevant to this:

‘Eisenhower’s Disarmament Dilemma: From Chance for Peace to Open Skies Proposal’ in Diplomacy and Statecraft, 2 (2001).
Kenneth A. Osgood, ‘Form before Substance: Eisenhower’s Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with the Enemy’ Diplomatic History, 3 (2000).

On European issues between the two protagonists:

M. Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the Europe Settlement 1945–1963 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999).
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997).
Wilfred Loth, Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente (Palgrave, New York, 2001).
Andreas Daum, Kennedy in Berlin (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Jeffrey Giauque, Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: the Atlantic powers and the reorganization of Western Europe, 1955-63 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2002).
Erin Mahan, Kennedy, de Gaulle and Western Europe (Palgrave, New York, 2002).
Pascaline Winand, Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe (Macmillan, Basingstoke. 1993).

On Trans-Atlantic relations:

Pascaline Winant, Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe (Macmillan, Basingstoke. 1993).

On Eastern European problems:

Christian F. Ostermann, ‘The United States, the East German Uprising of 1953 and the Limits of Rollback’, Working Paper 11, CWIHP (1994).
Mark Kramer, ‘The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2 (1998).
Alexsandr Stykalin, ‘The Hungarian Crisis of 1956: the Soviet Role in the Light of New Archival Documents’, Cold War History, 1 (2001).
Mark Kramer, ‘The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Influences in Soviet Policy Making’, Journal of Cold War Studies 1/1, 1/2, and 1/3 (1999).
C. Bekes, M. Byrne, J. Rainer, (eds) The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents, (Budapest, Central University Press, 2002).
J. Granville, The First Domino: International Decision-Making During the Hungarian Crisis of 1956, (Texas, A and M Press, 2004).
V. Mastny and M.Byrne, Malcolm (eds) A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991, Budapest, Central European University Press (2005)
Charles Gati, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington and the 1956 Hungarian revolt (Stanford University Press, 2006)

On armament:

Andreas Wenger, Living with Peril Eisenhower: Kennedy and Nuclear Weapons (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, 1997).
F. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1983).

On the Suez Crisis and the Middle East:

Keith Kyle, Suez (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1991).
W. S. Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain the US and the Suez Crisis (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1991).
British Documents on the End of Empire, Series B, vol. 4, J. Kent (ed.), Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, 1945–1956 (Stationery Office, London, 1998).
British Documents on the End of Empire, Series A, vol. 4, R. Hyam and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The Conservative Governments 1957–1964 (Stationery Office, London, 1998).

On US policy towards the Middle East:

Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: the Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, New Haven, 2004).
Warren Bass, Support any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the making of the US-Israeli alliance (Oxford University Press, 2002).

On Latin America for the contrasts and similarities between the policies of Eisenhower and Kennedy:

Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: the Foreign Policy of Anti-Communism (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988).
Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World. John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1999).
S. G. Rabe, ‘Controlling Revolutions: Latin America the Alliance for Progress and Cold War Anti-Communism’, in T. G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory (Oxford University Press, New York, 1989).
A. M. Schlesinger Jr., ‘The Alliance for Progress: a Retrospective’, in R. G. Hellman and H. J. Rosebaum (ed.), Latin America: the Search for a New International Role (Latin American International Affairs Series / Centre for Inter-American Relations, New York, 1975).

For details of the CIA coup in Guatemala:

R. H. Immermann, The CIA in Guatemala: the Foreign Policy of Intervention (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1982).
E. Kinzer, and S. Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit: the Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Doubleday, Garden City, 1982).

On the Berlin crises for material not based on archive sources:

H. M. Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Crisis (Berlin Verlag, Berlin, 1980).
J. M. Schick, The Berlin Crisis 1958–1962 (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1971).

And for the earlier origins which conditioned US policy:

David G. Coleman, ‘Eisenhower and the Berlin Problem 1953–1954’ Journal of Cold War Studies, 1 (2000).

On China, Sino-Soviet split and the offshore islands:

Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin (eds.), Re-examining the Cold War. US–China Diplomacy 1954–1973 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001).
Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance 1945–1963 (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Stanford, 1998).
G. H. Chang, Friends and Enemies: the US, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–72 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990).
Lorenz Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split (Princeton University Press, 2008).
Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet struggle for supremacy (Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington, 2009).

On the Cuban Missile Crisis:

Graham Allison and Philip D. Zelikov, Essence of Decision (Longman, New York, 2nd edn., 1999).
Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight (Knopf, New York, 2008).
Max Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War (Presidio, New York, 2004).
Sheldon Stern, The Week the World Stood Still (Stanford University Press, 2004).

See for a record of the Ex-Com meetings:

Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikov, The Kennedy Tapes inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997)

In general on the struggle in the so-called ‘third world’:

Kathryn Statler and Andrew Johns, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World and the Globalization of the Cold War (Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2006).

And for an approach mixing theory and history:

Graham Allison and Philip D. Zelikov, Essence of Decision (Longman, New York, 2nd edn., 1999).

For a focus on Cuba and the Soviet perspective:

Alexsandr Furschenko and Timothy Natfali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy 1958–1964 (Norton, New York, 1992).
J. G. Blight et al., ‘Essence of Revision: Moscow, Havana and the Cuban Missile Crisis’, International Security (1989/90).
Barton J. Bernstein, ‘Reconsidering Khrushchev’s Gambit—Defending the Soviet Union and Cuba’, Diplomatic History, 3 (1990).
P. Brenner, ‘Thirteen Months: Cuba’s Perspective on the Missile Crisis’ in James A. Nathan (ed.), The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited (St Martin’s Press, New York, 1992).

For details and debate:

James G. Hershberg, ‘Before the “Missiles of October”, Did Kennedy Plan a Military Strike against Cuba’, Diplomatic History, 2 (1990).
B. J. Bernstein, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis: Trading the Jupiters in Turkey’, Political Science Quarterly (1980).
James G. Blight, Joseph S. Nye, and David A. Welch, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited’ Foreign Affairs, 1 (1987).
R. N. Lebow, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis: Learning the Lessons Correctly’, Political Science Quarterly (1983).
R. N. Lebow, ‘Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis’, Diplomatic History, 2 (1990).

For details of the early years of the Vietnam conflict:

A. J. Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War (Longman, London, 1989).
David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (Columbia University Press, New York, 1991).
Smith, R. B., An International History of the Vietnam War, 1: Revolution Versus Containment (1983); 2: The Struggle for South-East Asia, 1961–5 (Macmillan, London, 1985).
John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception. Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (Warner, New York, 1992).
Cheng Guan Ang, Vietnamese Communists’ Relations with China and the Second Indochina Conflict, 1957–1962 (McFarland, Jefferson, 1997).
Stein Tonnesson, Vietnam 1946: how the war began (University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2011).
Mark Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2007).
James Waite, The End of the First Indochina War: an international history (Routledge, London 2012)

On the US attitudes to the End of the European Empires and the African crises which were important under Kennedy:

M. Kalb, The Congo Cables: the Cold War in Africa—from Eisenhower to Kennedy (Macmillan, New York, 1982).
R. D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (Oxford University Press, New York, 1983).
C. Fraser, ‘Understanding American Policy towards Decolonization’, Diplomacy and Statecraft (1992).
John Kent, America, the UN and Decolonisation Cold War Conflict in the Congo (Routledge, London, 2010)