The Occupation of Veracruz & Woodrow Wilson Woodrow Wilson and the Occu

An Affair of Honor retains its freshness after thirty years precisely because it does not pretend to be objective history. Scholarly though it is, the book reads sometimes like a journalistic account of the American occupation of Veracruz, and sometimes like an essay on the foundations of American foreign policy in this century. From beginning to end, the book is a story of men and their sympathies, rather than a careful history of the events in which those men participated. Excoriating Woodrow Wilson, one of the presidents most closely identified with liberalism, Quirk warns of the danger of diplomacy that is both well-intentioned and ill-informed.

An Affair of Honor was published in 1962. One cannot help but wonder, to begin with, if Quirk would have produced a vastly different book had he been writing even a year or two later. The only full year of Kennedy's presidency, 1962 was a crucial moment in so many ways. As subsequent events revealed, the ability of the United States and its leaders to balance peace and war, politics and idealism, had not evolved far across the five decades that separated Wilson's Mexican adventurism from the realities of the Cold War. Quirk's preface reveals that he finished his book on the heels of the Bay of Pigs disaster. He may have sensed the coming missile Crisis. In three years, the deterioration of U.S. policy in Latin America would be

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From the first, Quirk describes events as emerging from key aspects of a given man's character, and then he must revise his account to fit the men he includes and their actions. The instance of Admiral Mayo, the commander at Tampico, where the Veracruz crisis began, is a case in point. Almost at once, Mayo is the hard-edged, intelligent naval commander and the hard-headed, stubborn sailor who dragged the United States into moral and political crisis. "This was the man who saw the dangerous situation developing at Tampico," we are told at first. Ironically, it was he who transformed the atmosphere at Tampico from one of tension and some physical danger for foreign nationals to one of open warfare, entailing a much higher level of danger -- both physical and political -- for all concerned. Quirk's description of Mayo's response to conditions at Tampico seems to ignore the many times in history that commanders of forces representing Great Powers have protecting their nationals without allowing their actions to become central to a larger crisis. For that reason, Quirk's description of Mayo as highly capable, as manifesting the highest qualities of a naval officer, is confusing, considering that Quirk also argues that Mayo virt
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Approximate Word count = 1606
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)