New Books In National Security

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part. Our guest today–sponsored by the National History Center–is not among them. Julian Zelizer has used his historical research and writing to inform the public and public debate in a great variety of fora: magazines, newspapers, online outlets, radio, TV–and now New Books in History. Today we’ll be talking about his efforts to bring the historian’s voice to the public and his most recent book Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From WWII to the War on Terrorism (Basic Books, 2010) (which itself is a contribution to that effort). The book proves that in the U.S. politics does not “stop at the water’s edge”–not now, not ever. From the very beginning of the Republic, American foreign policy has been inform