Congressman Melvin Laird of Wisconsin is one of the Republican Party’s specialists in the field of foreign policy. As a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the House, he has had frequent access to information, much of it classified, on the state of America’s defenses and the condition of her fortunes abroad. Laird has now written a book on these matters, and in so doing he has joined Congressional expertise to a scholarly comprehension of Bolshevism and the struggle it has thrust upon us. A House Divided, subtitled “America’s Strategy Gap,” is a wise and often brilliant book, which reveals its author as considerably more knowledgeable than the official soothsayers whose views he examines.
His thesis is one familiar to readers of national review;yet he sets it forward with such clarity and thoroughness that it unfolds new insights at every turning. He begins with the affirmation that Western society, in its confrontation with Moscow, has something larger at stake than biological survival; that Western man, to be worthy of his heritage, must hold certain values important enough to die for them. Only if that proposition is central to our policy, Laird says, can we marshal a credible defense against the Communist enemy —a defense which can enable us both to resist and to survive, not as slaves but as free men. Upon this foundation, he builds his critique of our continuing default in the Cold War. America, he demonstrates, must:
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