Interim Report on the U.S. Search for a Substitute for Isolation

185, [3] pages. Occasional footnotes. DJ has some soiling, wear and small tears to dust jacket. Pencil erasure residue on fep. Includes Forward, Part One: Early Moves for a New U.S. Foreign Policy after World War II; Part Two: Failure in Asia; and Part Three: The Future. As Special Assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the closing days of World War II; as Chairman of the President's Air Policy Commission in 1947; as Secretary of the Air Force during the Korean war; and as U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 1961-1965, Thomas K. Finletter has been intimately involved in the efforts (successful up to a point) to change the United States position from historical isolation to responsible membership in the world community. Mr. Finletter examines in detail the disastrous American policy in Southeast Asia and particularly Vietnam, which has seriously hurt our hopes of finding a proper substitute for abandoned isolation. Finally he appraises the prospects for avoiding a return to isolation and for checking the downward course which seems to threaten us and to spell failure for our ambitions for an orderly world oriented toward control of the terrible weapons of modern war and toward a world free of the great wars which have plagued mankind all through history. Finletter's government career began in 1941 with a three-year assignment as a special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. His responsibilities included planning economic activities in areas liberated by the Allies during World War II, controlling foreign exchange, and overseeing the operations of the Alien Property Custodian. In May 1945 he became a consultant to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization, held in San Francisco, California. At that time he moved into the postwar international sphere with his association with the United World Federalists. His most notable public service prior to becoming air secretary occurred between 1947 and 1948 when he chaired the President Harry S Truman's Air Policy Commission. The commission's findings, titled Survival in the Air Age-but commonly called the Finletter Report-cautioned that an understrength Air Force would be unable to defend the United States against atomic attack. It urged that service capability be restored as soon as possible with the help of a viable aircraft industry, and it endorsed a seventy-group Air Force of 6,869 first-line aircraft, backed by a twenty-seven-group Air National Guard and an adequately equipped thirty-four-group Air Reserve. After the commission disbanded, Finletter headed the Economic Cooperation Administration's special mission to the United Kingdom until 1949. The mission was charged with managing Marshall Plan aid there. President Truman selected him to succeed Stuart Symington as Secretary of the Air Force in April 1950, primarily because of his excellent work on the Air Policy Commission. While Finletter concentrated on the larger issues of nuclear strategy and U.S. relations with member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the power vacuum within the national military establishment that had existed when James Forrestal was secretary of defense began to diminish as authority became centralized within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The individual services lost their executive branch status and were redesignated as military departments within the Department of Defense. In addition, the service secretaries lost their membership on the National Security Council, where they previously had sat as equals to the secretary of defense. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated].…