Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy. By James A. Bill. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xx, 274 pp. Cloth, $35.00, isbn 0-300-06969-3. Paper, $16.00, isbn 0-300-07646-0.)

George Wildman Ball, undersecretary of state in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, was one of the few heroic public figures in the United States during the Vietnam War. In 1965, he alone among Johnson's senior advisers argued against United States military escalation in South Vietnam and predicted with chilling accuracy the tragic course of the war. Why was Ball able to see so clearly what others could not? What are the lessons about statesmanship to be learned from this prescient and prudent public servant? James A. Bill probes those significant questions in this hard-hitting biography. An unabashed admirer of Ball, the author declares Ball's career "a model of effective statecraft for the future." Bill notes the diplomat's faults—Eurocentrism, elitism, stubbornness—but concludes that Ball possessed the cardinal political virtue that Aristotle labeled phronesis, a careful balance of means and ends in a clear moral framework premised on the public good. . . .

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