Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz
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 underscored by Lyndon Johnson's intervention in the Dominican Republic. Quirk could not have known that, even as he was turning his work over to his publisher, Kennedy was authorizing the sending of "military advisors" to an Asian nation about which few Americans had even heard. of course, Quirk could not have known that in little more than a year the Republic would be turned inside-out by Kennedy's assassination. Arguably, the year this book was published was the high-water mark of American power and p...