Book Reviews prestige of the professoriate. The military may have been civilianized as much as the professoriate was militarized. Second, Rohde truly thinks that the social scientists had something to teach the Army and that they advanced the aims of soldiers. At times she allows us to believe that specific research reports are blather but that overall the scholars produced useful “knowledge.” We have little consideration of the idea that, in general, what was man- ufactured may have been just some kind of informed verbiage. More important, the effusions of social science may have had little effect on U.S. foreign policy and little influence on what the military did. High-ranking military personnel may have simply gotten new names for old ways of thinking. Finally, with a historian’s hindsight, Rohde is easily able to make out how affairs of state influenced Cold War social science. Yet she does not so clearly grasp that her own left-liberal ideas have swayed her thinking, especially her ideas about recent foreign policy. For her and those she has studied, scholarship is too often the carrying on of politics by other means. ✣ ✣ ✣ Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones, Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 337 pp. Reviewed by John Prados, National Security Archive (Washington, DC) Irrational leaders pose special problems for scholars. Some future historian will have to have a say. What would that be? About Donald Trump? About Boris Johnson? Until recently, the British prime minister most often placed in this category was Anthony Eden, who served as foreign minister from 1951 to 1954, then succeeded Winston Churchill in the top job when the latter stepped down in the fall of 1954. The reason for singling Eden out—as Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones rightly note—is the min- ister’s extraordinarily reckless behavior in 1956, when Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and Eden conspired with France and Israel to get it back. Eden’s comments about Nasser and general deportment were such that others feared for his sanity. Former Minister of State Anthony Nutting supplied chapter and verse in his book No End of a Lesson. Ruane and Jones turn this image upside down in Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis. The crisis, for those not familiar, grew out of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, where French armies in Indochina strove to turn back a Vietnamese revolutionary tide that was headed to independence. The United States, having embarked on a crusade against Communism, considered whether to intervene on the French side in that battle, which would have embroiled U.S. troops in Vietnam years before that actually happened. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wavered on intervention and had a hard time resisting the pressure. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sought to create a political-military framework to enable intervention. Eden 176 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/23/2/176/1919929/jcws_r_01022.pdf by guest on 13 June 2021