Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War

Campbell Craig

Columbia University Press

1998

Acknowledgements

 

My first debt is to John Gaddis, my doctoral adviser and mentor. His dedication to scholarly rigor has made itself felt on every page in this book, as has his unbending insistence upon lively writing. For their professional comments I also thank Richard Immerman, Philip Nash, Richard Harknett, and Columbia’s anonymous reviewer, all of whom read the manuscript and saved me from many mistakes. For earlier direction and comments I’m grateful to Professors Alonzo Hamby, Akira Iriye, George Jewsbury, and Steve Miner, and also to Alecia Long, Joel Rosenthal, Oliver Schmidt, David Tait, Ruud Van Dijk, and Laird Wynn.

I would also like to thank Ben Frankel, for his consistent support of my scholarship, the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University, for financial and institutional help, and Kate Wittenberg and Leslie Bialler of Columbia University Press, for their editorial guidance. Here at the University of Hawaii, Professor Idus Newby read the manuscript from beginning to end and supplied me with literally hundreds of stylistic improvements. Liz Contrades did excellent, conscientious editing. The professional staff at the University library’s inter-library loan and government document departments fulfilled many last-minute requests. I also thank my colleagues here in the UH history department for their professional advice and encouragement of my work. Finally, thanks to Ev Wingert and especially Christina A. Tolosa at the UH Cartography lab.

Archivists at the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidential libraries, the Seeley Mudd library at Princeton, and the National Security Archive in Washington made this hit-and-run scholar feel welcome. Every student of American foreign policy owes a debt to the State Department’s historical division, whose Foreign Relations of the United States series is a shining example of what government documentation can be.

I completed the bulk of this book during the summer of 1996. I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a summer stipend that supported my writing, and Professor James Turner Johnson for encouraging me to introduce my thesis to a seminar at Rutgers on war and religion. I’m also grateful to my kind relatives in Delaware, who helped my wife and me make ends meet during our stay there. Right after we arrived my grandfather, Charles Noble Lanier Jr., died. He was a role model for me, both as a scholar and as a decent man. I hope that this book honors his memory.

My parents, Bruce and Andrea Craig, have supported my academic career with both loving support and intellectual input. My wife Christine has endured the high insecurity of being married to a young professor with seemingly limitless good humor. She has also edited this book with a skilled hand. I dedicate it to her and our two little girls.