M. Mysl'. 1983. 294 p.

34th President of the United States D. Eisenhower appears in a new study by an international historian, senior researcher at the Institute of General History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor R. F. Ivanov, as an active defender of the class interests of the US ruling circles. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Eisenhower was actively involved in the development of plans to launch atomic strikes against the USSR, unleash an all-out nuclear war against socialist countries and their occupation (plans "Totality", "Dropshot", "Solarium", etc.). the goal is to create a peacemaker aura around yourself.

The author used documents and materials, including archival materials that were not previously mentioned in Soviet historiography, as well as recordings of conversations with people who knew Eisenhower - with his son John, a brigadier general in the reserve, a former US ambassador to Belgium, and the president's own brother Milton.

In his political biography of Eisenhower, R. F. Ivanov paid special attention to the period of his tenure as President of the United States. Devoting the first two chapters of the book to the first fifty years of the president's life, the author introduces the reader to the events of World War II, connected with the formation of Eisenhower as a military figure of national and international scale. At the same time, it is emphasized that Eisenhower, like other military figures of the United States and Great Britain, was a consistent performer of the military-political concepts of the ruling circles of these countries, but at the same time he was also characterized by a certain political realism, which was manifested, in particular, when solving issues related to the opening of the second front in Europe, the capture of Berlin relations with the Soviet Ally as a whole.

R. F. Ivanov makes extensive use of the five-volume collection of documents related to Eisenhower's wartime activities published in the United States in the early 1970s. However, even this voluminous publication cannot be considered complete, since the materials contained in it were carefully reviewed before publication - and not by one US government agency - in order to determine whether their publication would "damage" the country's national security interests. According to available information, even after the contents of the five-volume book were agreed with and approved by all "interested agencies", another 2% of documents were withdrawn from it1 .

The question of how complete and exhaustive the material available to the researcher is (especially those related to the not so distant past) cannot be qualified as idle. The fact is that at the beginning of the 70s in the United States there were 125 million (!) pages of secret documentation from the Second World War, including 20 million. pages classified by a joint decision of the US and UK governments. The current US administration has made a significant contribution to further tightening the requirements for declassifying documents. Thus, the declassification of documents related to 1950 - 1954 is limited and includes, in particular, the years of the Korean War, after which 50 million people remained. There are hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documentation, and, according to experts, hundreds of years will pass before many of them become public. (You can

1 International Herald Tribune, 16 - 17.V.1970.

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imagine the volume of secret documentation left over from ten years of American aggression in Southeast Asia and only in a scanty part and in a carefully prepared form - only 7 thousand pages, which fit into 47 volumes-published in the form of the sensational "Pentagon documents".) Archival foreign policy documents published recently in the United States in two separate versions. In the first two volumes, they represent an extremely insignificant and most "harmless" part of the secret documentation of the period of the Eisenhower presidency from the point of view of official circles in Washington. A much more impressive part of it remains hidden from the public, and first of all, documents that shed light on the actions and decisions of the president himself remain classified. The American researcher B. W. Cook, who used all the documentary material available to her, stated that the declassification of documents during the Eisenhower presidency affected almost exclusively the actions and decisions of government departments and other persons, but not the US president and the White House. However, she notes that "the available evidence indicates that nothing happened without Eisenhower's knowledge and personal approval." 2
Perhaps it would not have been necessary to speak in such detail about the problems faced by a researcher of this period of modern US history, if it were not for the fact that R. F. Ivanov, in his work on the final and most impressive in terms of volume and content of the fourth chapter of the monograph, practically exhausted all the sources and literature published at both in the USA and in the USSR.

From his first months in the White House, whether it was in his announced campaign "in defense of the enslaved peoples" of Eastern Europe, in supporting Dulles ' policy of "balancing on the brink of war", in suppressing the revolution in Guatemala, in invading the Dominican Republic, in conducting an operation to overthrow the Iranian government led by Mossadegh, in The main goal of Eisenhower, as the monograph convincingly shows, was to preserve capitalism (or the "free world" to use Eisenhower's terminology) in order to contain the national liberation movement in the Middle East, in hostile actions against Cuba, in the first manifestations of armed intervention in the affairs of Indochina, or in the international U-2 spy plane scandal.) as a world, "global" system and discrediting socialism through political, economic and psychological warfare.

Assessing the role played by Eisenhower and his administration in exacerbating international tensions in the 1950s, R. F. Ivanov rightly draws attention to their "contribution" to the militarization of diplomacy, to the creation of military-political blocs directed against socialist and young sovereign states. The book contains convincing material that allows the author to conclude that the attempts of bourgeois researchers to present Eisenhower as a peacemaker are not supported by any convincing facts.

So, on March 27, 1953, D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John F. Kennedy met. Dulles at a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) formulated the thesis about the need to "somehow dispel the impression that there is a ban on the use of nuclear weapons." According to a long-standing classified transcript of the NSC meeting, Dulles stated-in the presence and with the President's knowledge-that "in the current state of world public opinion (which was indelibly impressed by the suffering and devastation brought by World War II to a significant part of humanity, as well as the horrors associated with the American nuclear power plant by bombing Japanese cities. - E. I.) we cannot resort to an atomic bomb" and therefore the United States "should take all possible steps to dispel such prejudice." 3 A few days later, on March 31, 1953, the President himself raised the issue of the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War at a meeting of the National Security Council, expressing the opinion that it was possible to use them in order to achieve victory in a major military conflict.

2 Cook B. W. The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy. N. Y. 1981, p. 219.

3 Cit. by: Progressive, August 1984, p. 10.

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These statements, as well as the attitude of the Eisenhower administration to the possibility of unleashing a nuclear war, became public only recently as a result of the publication of the above - mentioned two-volume collection of US foreign policy documents dating back to 1952-1954. 4 Archival documents declassified by the US State Department show that from the very first months in power, the Eisenhower administration relied on using all the political, economic, propaganda, military and intelligence tools available to it to "undermine Soviet military power." A special role was assigned to covert operations, provocations, and political blackmail designed to promote the political, economic, and military isolation of the USSR and to split the unity of socialist countries.

From the same published archival foreign policy documents, it follows that the Dulles plan to create a permanent threat of" total war " against the USSR was supported by Eisenhower with certain reservations that reflected his personal concerns about the possibility of direct armed conflict with the Soviet Union. Back in August 1952, at a meeting of the National Security Council, it was noted that " the growing atomic potential of the USSR and the possibility of the emergence of thermonuclear weapons... they fundamentally change the position of the United States in terms of security " and " make the United States very vulnerable." It is precisely these concerns about the possible serious consequences of a military clash with the Soviet Union for the United States itself, and not some kind of restraint or moderation of Eisenhower's political positions, that should explain the fact that humanity managed to avoid a nuclear war in the 50s.

Eisenhower's occasional sound statements about the need to find mutually acceptable solutions to acute international problems for the United States and the USSR, and his calls for restraint, were undoubtedly linked to the fact that the Soviet Union was growing in power and political influence. In April 1956, Eisenhower wrote in a personal letter: "When one day we reach a state of affairs in which both sides (i.e., the United States and the USSR) understand that in the event of any military action, regardless of the surprise factor, the destruction will be mutual and complete, then perhaps we will be smart enough to meet at the negotiating table, recognizing that the age of armaments is over and that the human race must either measure its actions against this truth or perish. " 5
The abundance of material used in the book, however, has led to the fact that the author is sometimes forced to present it in a patter or dry, almost telegraphic language. Apparently, it would be more reasonable to abandon the use of secondary or even secondary material in order to give the book a vividness of presentation that does not reduce its scientific and research sound. It has already been noted above that one of the advantages of the monograph is the use of unique recordings of the author's conversations with people who knew the president intimately. However, despite the importance of first-hand information for any researcher, the author sometimes overly trusts the judgments and assessments contained in clearly biased and biased sources.

On one of the first pages of the monograph, R. F. Ivanov emphasizes the role of the subjective factor in world politics, and especially in the United States, where the president as the chief executive and head of state has exceptionally broad powers. At the same time, the author emphasizes the class interests of the US leadership, which Eisenhower faithfully served throughout his long military and then political career, while remaining a consistent defender of American state - monopoly capitalism.

4 United States Foreign Policy, 1952 - 1954, National Security Issues. Washington. 1984.

5 Cit. по: International Herald Tribune, 7.IX.1983.

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