This book suggests comparisons with Wendell Willkie's famous One World. In both, Republican leaders better than any Democrats stated for the whole public the form and content of evolving United States foreign policy. But Willkie's book was a rapt vision of utopia; John Foster Dulles' book is a sober redemption of hope after five years of discouragement. The two books are signposts marking the distance we have traversed from the dream of One World right away to an awakening with attendant determination to prevent sad experience from reconciling us permanently to two worlds.

Wendell Willkie reported on his trip, which was little more than an inspirational junket, to the allied nations during the war. Mr. Dulles reports on his experience in the actual making of administration policy. Thus the two books are also signs of the rapid development of bipartisanship in the conduct of our foreign relations. War or Peace is furthermore a primer of recent and current events and a preachment of the necessity to strengthen internationalist doctrine and practice as the best means to prevent a third world war.

It is the best primer available to spell out for citizens the essentials of what has been happening in the main arenas. Specialists will be appalled by Mr. Dulles' distortions-by-omission, which are sometimes severe even for a primer. But specialists rarely speak to the average citizen to any purpose, and Mr. Dulles has a purpose which must be achieved if we are to construct a viable peace or at least win if we are forced to fight. His purpose is to convince Americans that our policy since 1945 has been sound and that no other policy than collective security—neither appeasement in hope of an easy peace nor isolation in hope of security nor aggression in hope of victory over communism—is practicable.

The author is aware that the crux of the struggle between the United States and Russia is their competition for the moral leadership of humanity. He does not stress the religious ambience of his own morality; but his association with a major effort to find a common denominator among religious groups has evidently convinced him that all human beings share the essentials of morality. Honesty, he believes, is really our best policy. He gives us evidence that keen moral sense and respect for it in mankind have guided crucial decisions of our government in recent years. He concludes that the view of the small free nations after the war that they might remain neutral in the struggle between the United States and Russia, that it was merely another old-fashioned, a-moral sruggle for power, was demolished by the actual conduct of the United States.

Specialists will want to know more than Mr. Dulles tells them of recent international relations before they accept his conclusion that good and evil are entirely polarized between the United States and Russia. Busy with data on Arabian oil, West German cartels, dollar shortages abroad, and so forth, political scientists may delude themselves that the value judgments in which Mr. Dulles deals are naïve. A primer for Everyman is just the place to assert the primacy of moral issues in international affairs. Unless everything changes, the American people will in the long run see to it that their government's policy is plainly moral.

As an account of the author's experience in recent international negotiations, War or Peace is a disappointment. The text gives the impression that it was dictated from memory unaided by notes, and Mr. Dulles claims a great deal of credit for himself. He implies mat his advice to Secretary Byrnes during the September 1945 London Council of Foreign Ministers (p. 30) ended "the epoch of Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam," and inaugurated me policy of "no appeasement". It is not true that in the Atlantic Charter "no mention was made of an international organization" (p. 33). Section Eight declares Roosevelt's and Churchill's belief that, after disarmament of the aggressor nations, a "permanent system of general security" should be established. Mr. Dulles states that private effort, including that of a committee which he headed for the Federal Council of Churches, "transformed the attitude" of the government (p. 34). He claims that postwar bipartisanship in foreign policy had its "birth" in August 1944, when Governor Dewey asked him to confer with Secretary Hull on the projected United Nations (p. 123). Bipartisanship was actually "born" on September 20, 1939, when President Roosevelt conferred with Alfred M. Landon and Frank Knox on the repeal of the arms embargo, and Wendell Willkie certainly helped bipartisanship to grow.

Mr. Dulles rises above partisan history in the passages of War or Peace which plead for strengthened internationalism among our people and in our policy. Besides exhortations, he offers in chapter vi, "The United Nations in Operation", a solid analysis designed to show that its successes were notable even prior to Korea. Other chapters also contain penetrating expositions and arguments in support of collective security.

The book does a great deal to make the meanings of recent world affairs and of our policy available to the public. Its wide popularity encourages hope that public understanding may keep pace with at least the broad outlines of the world situation and that popular American support of the United Nations will survive the failure to realize immediately Willkie's dream of One World.