| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy. By Robert D. Dean. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. xii, 329 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-55849-312-3.)

In his 2003 state of the union address, President George W. Bush reported that "3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested.... Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way—they are no longer a problem to the United States." Robert D. Dean argues that, even as such cowboy masculinity has influenced U.S. foreign policy, so has a more reticent elite masculinity characteristic of the class into which Bush was born. Not making totalizing claims about gender, Dean is convincing that gender can matter; specifically, it helps explain why the policy elite had a "'pathological'" commitment to the Vietnam War, "a war they predicted the United States could not win" (pp. 241, 243).

Dean's argument has four steps. Traditionally, the foreign policy "establishment" was recruited from an eastern elite stratum. Carefully groomed in sex-segregated prep schools, Ivy League colleges, fraternities, secret societies, and urban men's clubs, the elite formed an "imperial brotherhood." In contrast to socialization for less privileged men, elite socialization nurtured a sense of manhood that assumed its members would serve society by leading it, an expectation consolidated by voluntary military service that they believed imbued them with a "martial masculine virtue ... inseparable from masculine civic and political virtue" (p. 38).

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