Friends and Enemies

Reviews / Votes

'Takes a novel approach, applying a gender analysis to a well-worn subject.'
Mervyn O'Driscoll, University College Cork

'A good history of World War II from three perspectives: the Irish, British, and American. Garner shows not only how Ireland fit into Big power relations, but how the small country proved to have a seminal role in many issues in the world war.'
Thomas W Zeiler, University of Colorado, Boulder

'Drawing on archival research and recent scholarship on the impact of gendered and national identities on leaders' relationships and international relations, Garner (Empire State College, SUNY) examines the efforts of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enlist neutral Ireland-led by Prime Minister Eamon de Valera-in the Allied cause during WW II. She focuses on how Churchill and Roosevelt's "fraternal friendship," based on masculine ideology, influenced their campaigns to rally their nations to war against the Axis powers and to sway de Valera, who remained firmly committed to a foreign policy grounded in his own masculine assertion of Ireland's national sovereignty and of Irish, not British or American, interests throughout the war. Garner also describes the relationships and activities of the leaders' foreign policy advisers in Dublin, British Representative Sir John Maffey, Irish Cabinet Secretaries Joseph Walshe and Frank Aiken, and US Minister to Ireland David Gray, as well as Gray's friend and confidante, American war correspondent Helen Kirkpatrick, whose reporting conveyed her pro-British sympathy and hostility toward Irish neutrality to her readers and radio audiences. This study, which blends diplomatic history and gender and national identity theory in a coherent narrative, will interest students of WW II and 20th-century Ireland.

Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.'
A. H. Plunkett, University of Virginia, CHOICE (July 2022 Vol. 59 No. 11) -- .