The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance by Geoffrey W. Jensen (review)
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The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance by Geoffrey W. Jensen
Nathan K. Finney
The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance. By Geoffrey W. Jensen. Modern War Studies. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2023. Pp. xxxiv, 395. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-3529-0; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-3531-3.)
Analyzing the critical role of the American president in driving racial equality in the military during the Cold War, The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance focuses on the accomplishments and failures of administrations from Harry S. Truman’s to Richard M. Nixon’s. It is the first book written by Geoffrey W. Jensen, an associate professor of history at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Using the lens of presidential power, Jensen attempts to supplement recent historical scholarship that focuses on bottom-up civil rights and public action for desegregation by describing how the integration of the military was dependent on presidents using their power to force change.
The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces builds on previous research, however, by describing how pressure from civil rights activists and [End Page 455] the dynamics of Cold War ideologies pushed presidents toward integrating the military, for reasons of both morality and military effectiveness. On the other side of the equation, white southern culture and political power inhibited the integration of the military. According to Jensen, the American presidency sat in the middle of these forces, capable of changing the status of African Americans in the military by using its power to force change. Whether a president was willing to wield such power was dependent on their personality and incentives at that time. The causality and processes in which such change happened are somewhat opaque, however, requiring the reader to piece them together over the course of the book. Additionally, the three main elements at the heart of Jensen’s analysis—activist and geopolitical pressure, southern political sway, and presidents’ positions—ebb and flow throughout the narrative without clear description of causality, reducing the salience of their interplay as drivers or inhibitors of racial integration.
This book is composed of six main chapters, beginning with a brief discussion on race and the military from the founding of the United States to the Cold War. The remaining chapters describe the presidential administrations of Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Nixon. The Korean and Vietnam Wars were also key events impacting integration. Jensen also includes a preface and epilogue. The former lays out his main arguments, while the latter brings events forward from the Nixon administration to today and provides the author’s opinions on racial integration in the current U.S. military and recommendations for the future. The sources supporting all the chapters are fairly robust, though there are gaps. For example, Jensen’s research is light on the military itself, a key agent in the integration of the military. Additionally, the book would benefit from the inclusion of civil-military and organizational military historiography to inform his analysis.
In places, the language of The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces is somewhat contradictory. It includes definitive statements about the power of the president to force change, while also describing the external pressures from individuals and groups that act as primary drivers of or inhibitors to presidential action. As a result, the reader is left with the impression that whether a president pushed forward integration, let alone where and how, was either decided largely on the whim of the president or contingent on external factors. Despite these challenges, Jensen’s refocusing of the role of the president as a key driver of racial integration in the military—though shaped through civic action, considerations of contemporary foreign policy, and southern culture and political power—are all worthy of reflection for scholars of the Cold War, the military, and southern history.
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