The usual heartfelt sentence to one’s wife would in this case be a wholly inadequate expression of gratitude for constant aid in gathering and digesting material; patience in typing and re-typing so large a manuscript; good judgment on innumerable points of content; comradely interest in the unfolding story; shared concern over the apparently endless series of crises in the nuclear age; years cheerfully devoted to the task at the expense of other interests; and help in making the index.

I am indebted also to the institutions which have provided time and resources for the long development of this study, first to Chancellor Harvie Branscomb, of Vanderbilt University, for making adequate arrangements for timely leaves of absence on three occasions. My share of the ready helpfulness which Dean Leonard B. Beach, of the Vanderbilt Graduate School, accords to all of his faculty, has also been generous. Invaluable, too, has been the support of Director George W. Stocking and the Vanderbilt Institute of Research in the Social Sciences, who have aided with grants at timely intervals from the beginning of the project to its publication.

Two other educational centers supplied ideal facilities for research and writing: one at the beginning of this study, the other at the end. My thanks are due to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer for the year 1948–1949 at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and to Dr. A. Appadorai for the year 1959–1960 at the Indian School of International Studies in New Delhi.

Many librarians have given their help, especially Clara M. Brown, the reference librarian at the Joint Universities Library in Nashville, whose always willing hands have supplied many a detail in these pages.

Dr. Norman L. Parks, an esteemed former colleague, contributed nearly all of the research and writing for Chapter XX, “The Fall of China to Communism”. Anyone who has ever tried to compress so vast a story into one chapter will know what labor that requires. I should add that my own decade of reading the available literature about China confirms in detail what he has written.

I am grateful, also, for assistance in keen thinking and related research to a dozen generations of students in my seminar, and to some hundreds of others in my larger class in world politics. I think no one could have been blessed with more stimulating or rewarding students.

Certainly no one could have been more fortunate in having as his friends, Cyril J. Bath, Stewart Meacham, Nathaniel Micklem and Francis Wormuth.

They have sustained the undertaking at many points by their belief in its necessity, and their warm friendship and support have been essential to its completion.

I am grateful to Ken McCormick and George Shively, of Doubleday and Company, and to Philip Unwin and Malcolm Barnes, of George Allen and Unwin Ltd., for their patience and courtesy in considering a manuscript of this size and in piloting it through to publication. My debt to Shively is unique, never to be forgotten.

My enduring appreciation is due also to the editors of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Journal of Politics and the Western Political Quarterly for publishing throughout a period of national hysteria my articles questioning both the Cold War and the witch hunt. The writing of these articles helped this book and of course my work on it helped them. This was true, also, of my regular articles in the Classmate and the British Weekly.

It should not be assumed that those who have aided my research would approve or disapprove of what I have written. It is an essential part of our democratic heritage that it is the responsibility of a scholar to vouch for the accuracy of the material which he presents and to come to his own conclusions.