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"What began as a relatively bounded project examining the domestic debate over Central America evolved into a comprehensive history of U.S. policy toward the region during its decade of crisis--how policy was made, how it worked, and how the administration tried to sell it to the American people." According to William LeoGrande, American involvement in Central America in the 1970s and '80s can be understood only in the context of the Cold War, and its greater struggle against the Soviet Union. Central America--and by this William LeoGrande means mainly El Salvador and Nicaragua--was simply one of several stages upon which these political war games were played. This was especially true during the Reagan years, during which U.S. policy "shifted from Carter's attempts to seek a negotiated settlement in El Salvador, and coexistence with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, to Reagan's effort to achieve military victory for the Salvadoran government, and the ouster of the Sandinistas by covert proxy war."
In Our Own Backyard, LeoGrande traces the evolution of American policy in Central America as well as its reception by the Congress and people of the United States. He discusses the schisms within Reagan's own ranks, the struggle between the Republican White House and the Democratic congress, and how the ever-present shadow of Vietnam continued to shape American attitudes well into the 1990s. This is a book that liberals will love and conservatives will find plenty to disagree with.
From Publishers Weekly
This important expose documents the full extent of the Reagan administration's lies, deceptions, subterfuges and cover-ups in waging a covert war against Nicaragua's Sandinistas and in supporting El Salvador's right-wing oligarchy in its war against leftist guerrillas. While the Iran-Contra hearing would reveal how Reagan's White House aides diverted profits from arms sales to support the CIA-backed contra army, LeoGrande, an American University government professor who worked on congressional Democratic committees that helped shape U.S. Central American policy in the mid-'80s, digs deeper, drawing hundreds of his own interviews with members of Congress, Reagan and Bush staffers and Central American officials. He argues convincingly that Reagan hardliners?notably Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Casey, Edwin Meese, William Clark?wrested day-to-day control of Central American policy away from the State Department. Ideologically committed (as was Reagan) to purging the national psyche of the "Vietnam syndrome" by means of a quick, decisive victory over communism in Central America, these hardliners worked to circumvent congressional restraints and derail dialogue with the Sandinistas. LeoGrande credits pragmatic President Bush with encouraging the diplomatic process that led to the Sandinistas' electoral defeat in 1990 and acerbically points out that the negotiated settlement that ended El Salvador's civil war in 1992 was strikingly similar to a peace proposal made by Salvadorean guerrillas 11 years earlier. Full of unorthodox, original perspectives, LeoGrande's clearly written, magisterial study holds timely post-Cold War lessons that transcend the Central American setting. Editor, Elaine Maisner; UNC foreign rights contact, Vicky Wells.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
