"Hey, I'm a sensitive kinda guy." When a tearful George W. Bush uttered these words during a press conference held two days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the spindoctors pounced. Pundit after pundit proclaimed Bush's emotional response a winning move. He had been too emotionally distanced, they said; no wonder New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani was upstaging him as the reassuring voice of leadership. Bush needed to shed a few public tears, to choke up and show his humanity. The American people wanted proof that their president felt their grief, their loss.

The dubious validity of the spindoctors' commentary notwithstanding, that Bush's lachrymose press conference elicited so much response suggests that more was at stake than how he was faring in the opinion polls. Implicit in the discussions of his emotional responses were the tangled relationship between masculinity and national leadership. Bush—like other national political figures—was expected to mourn publicly with his brethren, but his mourning could not degenerate into sobbing; that would undermine his credibility as a leader capable of reassuring the public that things were "under control." By declaring himself a "sensitive kinda guy," Bush was (however unwittingly) negotiating the contradictory expectations inherent in contemporary perceptions of masculinity and nationalism.

It was in this climate, this critical moment of interplay between masculinity and patriotic leadership, that I read Suzanne Clark's Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West. Cold Warriors investigates the gendered legacy of U.S. national identity, and its publication could not be more timely. Unraveling the illusory coherence of Cold War masculinity, Cold Warriors explores how we got here—how the tradition of Cold War rhetoric produced and reproduced a gendered hegemony that continues to inform perceptions of masculinity and nationalism, as well as the academy's relationship to both.

Clark's thesis is clear: Cold War rhetoric forced masculinity into crisis through a series of ideological moves that equated realism with violence, privileged the supposed objectivity of science and rationalism, and denied the presence (as well as the absence) of cultural others. Even as the nuclear bomb invalidated the mythic heroic nationalism of a Teddy Rooseveltish frontier manliness, Cold War ideology invalidated any tolerance for epistemological ambiguity. The male subject of Cold War nationalism was "both dominant and beset," but national rhetoric stabilized identity through scapegoating, paranoia, and blame. Of course, the Cold War period was fraught with complex and varied narratives about masculinity and reality, and Clark does not ignore this challenge. She explains, "I am describing a historical moment characterized by its apparent simplicity, a single narrative frozen into ahistoricity. The freezing of time and change in the Cold War culture was an illusion, but when I talk about the Cold War configuration, I reproduce that illusion: of a simplicity that contains threat." Clark emphasizes, however, that threats to Cold War simplicity and coherence were always in plain view, subdued only by a kind of "dream logic" that denied and contained those threats.

The sources and tactics of that dream logic are the subjects of chapters 1 and 2. How, Clark asks, did the hypermasculinity of Cold War rhetoric command such a firm grip on national identity? And how was this hypermasculinity reproduced through the literary establishment? For Clark, answers to these questions lie in the national construction of realism—both historical and literary. The trauma of the period—manifested in atomic threat, physically and emotionally wounded veterans, post-Holocaust refugees, and the disorienting demands of Soviet politics—disrupted traditional narratives of historical reality and reassembled those narratives in light of extremity and violence. Cold War discourse produced a political realism that masqueraded as an ahistorical truth, rather than a rhetorically created, embodied, ideological stance. Tensions between truth and rhetoric, Clark asserts, took on a new intensity in the Cold War period. The central site of that tension was the Cold Warrior. The Cold Warrior, he who exercises power through force, was gendered masculine, while the rhetor, she who exercises power through persuasion, was gendered feminine. Yet, this gendering was rendered invisible, natural; the Cold Warrior came to represent the disembodied, genderless everyman who modeled "real" patriotism and national identity.

Though such an overview of Cold War gender hegemony may be familiar to many of us interested in that historical juncture, Clark's real contributions come into play as she connects this history to the academy's critical frameworks. The literary establishment, she asserts, expanded ideologies of political/national realism into the arena of literary realism: "Cold War criticism had the same effect that McCarthy's anticommunism had: it silenced the speech of subversives in the interests of defense." Realism and reason—for both liberal and anticommunist intellectuals—became the most powerful armor against nationalist totalitarianism. As liberal university professors enthusiastically embraced a distanced, apolitical critical stance, as they venerated alienation as the contemporary Zeitgeist, they buttressed the very totalitarian rhetoric à la McCarthy that they wanted to undermine. And as anticommunist intellectuals supported a Cold War version of American individualism by firming up the gendered boundaries between the rational and irrational (communism by its very essence, they argued, being irrational because of its threat to the individual), they, too, reproduced Cold War rhetoric. Both camps contributed to an overdetermined hypermasculine critical stance that exalted the alienation of the individual over the collective power of the community, that psychologized the political toward a paranoid orientation, and that created a fear of the scapegoated other as "unAmerican." Hence, even as critical academics battled McCarthyism's obvious threats to intellectual freedom, their responses were hegemonically whirlpooled into the hypermasculine rhetoric of the period, resulting in the now-incredible white, male American canon that held sway over the university for nearly half a century. As Clark explains, "The paradox of the Cold War's hypermasculinity is that its use of gender eliminated or abjected and feminized all differences, making critical portrayals of masculinity or femininity appear disruptive, irrational, excessive, or politically misguided."

Clark discusses this process of abjection by examining critical reception of the oft-hypermasculinized work of Ernest Hemingway. In chapter 3, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Postheroic Arena: Reading Hemingway Again," she argues that Cold War critical traditions continue to regulate our contemporary theoretical frameworks. Even many feminist critiques of Hemingway's treatment of gender, she explains, are subject to the very foundations of hypermasculinity that they seek to dismantle. Now, this is tough stuff for many feminist rhetoricians like myself. While I wouldn't negate the historical import of Hemingway's work, its prominence in literature programs does represent to me an irritating and still-too-powerful old guard. I distinctly remember, in my M.A. program, nearly failing an exam question because I did not comment on what my professor considered an all-important double entendre: in a Nick Adams story, the father offers young Nick "another piece" (ha!) of pie after they catch Trudy, the Native American girl with whom Nick is infatuated, having sex with another boy. Years later, à la feminist reader response theory, I understood that my oversight had less to do with "poor reading" and more to do with my gendered subjectivity. While mine might be an idiosyncratic experience, I suspect that many fellow travelers feel the same hostile ambivalence about Hemingway's work, or at least the way it was taught to us. So, it was not without trepidation that I read Clark's contributions to the recent wave of feminist attempts to reclaim Hemingway. Her analysis, however, differs from many such attempts. Rather than simply arguing that Hemingway has been misread, she cites the critical reception of his work as evidence of the staggering cultural losses we incurred as a result of Cold War rhetoric.

The backdrop for Clark's critique is Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Rider image—the pinnacle of a pre-Cold War nationalistic and imperial discourse of manliness. Though Hemingway admired Roosevelt, he resisted the masculine imperialism of Roosevelt's writing/image and the literary hegemony of frontier realism. For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example, located moral action in the company of communists. However, trapped in the Cold War rhetoric of an exclusionary hypermasculinity and national defense, Hemingway's critics denied the nuances of his writing. Clark insists that Hemingway's work emphasizes the "great difficulty civilized peoples have in relationships with others," yet the Cold War literary theme of alienation rendered both Hemingway's emphasis on social bonds and his attention to complex gender relations impossible. Though Hemingway's work was immersed in history and politics, critical intellectuals were disciplined to avoid both, and they could not negotiate those topics without appearing unliterary. The crisis of masculinity, the cross-gendering themes, the complex realist style—these features of both Hemingway's writings and his Papa image were victims of an invisible Cold War gendering, which, Clark insists, we can see now only as that rhetoric's power is loosening its hold.

Implicit in Clark's discussion of Hemingway is how he circulates as pedagogical cultural capital—in both the academy and mass culture. This theme of Cold War rhetoric's power to circumscribe pedagogical formations is especially pronounced in chapter 4, "Unsettling the West: The Persecution of Science and Bernard Malamud's A New Life." In this chapter, Clark discusses Malamud's novel in light of the institutional politics at her home institution, Oregon State University, where chemistry professor Ralph Spitzer was fired in 1949 for being a communist, the year that Malamud began teaching at Oregon State. Undoubtedly, Spitzer's plight informed the plot of A New Life, and Clark examines the interplay between several issues: the anticommunist political terror that produced so many casualties in American universities, and the development of a particular kind of myth-making realism common to writers like Malamud, who, while not political writers in the direct sense, nonetheless struggled against Cold War logics of fascism. She also plants an additional question: what accounts for the sudden renaissance of Jewish writers during the Cold War, given that anti-Semitism and anticommunism were linked through the rhetorical quest to erase difference and heterogeneity?

Clark addresses these issues by focusing again on Cold War themes of alienation and hypermasculine individuality, particularly as they shaped scientific realism. In a harrowing account of political persecution, she illustrates that Spitzer's firing was an outgrowth of the national realism of the Cold War. As science—particularly nuclear energy—came under the jurisdiction of an expanding security state, so did scientists. And both were expected to be ideologically neutral, even as they flagrantly represented Cold War ideology. Spitzer's political activities cast suspicion on his scientific contributions as mere outgrowths of the party line, and he was purged in a flurry of paranoid rhetoric. As Clark argues, Cold War rhetoric worked to eliminate a sense of community and any potential alliance between science and storytellers in the name of scientific realism: "The Cold War made both complexity and the personal view impossible, reducing everything that touched the issue to the distorted mirror of the terrorizing campaign. Evidence of the violence showed in accusations, firings, and even jail sentences. But much of the violence operated on the possibilities of discourse, a vast deadening." It was this deadening effect, Clark announces, that Malamud addresses in A New Life, which tells the story of how a radical, trouble-making professor was marginalized and erased from history in the American academy. Writing out of a Jewish tradition of storytelling, a tradition in which not to tell is not to remember, Malamud's work represents fissures in Cold War ideology: it resists overt political commentary, even as its "transcendental hypermasculinity" allowed for political and erotic transgression to overlap, illustrating the ubiquity of anticommunist censorship and prewar anti-Semitism. A New Life, Clark asserts, has too often been read as a myth of individualism, a tendency that obscures its political implications and reinforces the loss of memory that accompanied the Cold War.

This chapter is certainly among the most powerful in Cold Warriors, eloquently personalizing the horror of Cold War paranoia and its effect on academic discourse. No institution of higher learning has escaped its legacy, and Clark's focus on scientific realism and alienation is significant. Yet, I was hoping to see a more developed discussion of the ongoing effects of the Cold War's "persecution of science" in light of the issues of national identity and patriotism so prevalent throughout the book. As institutions of higher learning organized themselves around the demands of the military-industrial complex, the role of English departments dramatically shifted. Consider, for example, that when in 1954 Congress passed Public Law 531, setting the precedent of federally funded and controlled educational research through the National Defense Education Act, English departments were left out of the loop. Though many English studies educators insisted that literacy was a key weapon in the defense against communism, they received none of the funding granted to science, mathematics, and foreign languages in the interest of national defense. It was not until 1961 that Congress authorized limited funds for the improvement of English instruction, and disparities in humanities and sciences funding continue today. Similarly, Cold War rhetoric dramatically changed perceptions of the civic role of post-secondary education. Scientific realism and objectivity privileged the role of scientifically educated experts over that of ordinary citizens in public affairs. Activists, particularly intellectual activists, became the objects of derision or humor, as activism became associated with radicalism. Thus, ironically, one legacy of Cold War paranoid scientism is that of the disengaged citizen who feels unentitled or helpless to act in a civic capacity. Perhaps this helplessness also explains why Malamud's characters are so often Chaplinesque antiheroes and why so many English studies professionals today resist civic engagement.

In chapters 5 and 6, Clark discusses two authors who challenged Cold War dogmas of nationalism, realism, and gender: Mari Sandoz and Ursula Le Guin. She interprets their work not only as precursors to contemporary postmodern critique, but as in "the shadow of the struggle over a unifying masculinity that controlled the field of interpretation." It is in these chapters that Clark develops a fascinating discussion of class issues as they intersect with gender and ethnicity in Cold War rhetoric. Sandoz and Le Guin were both enabled and contained by their consignment to "middlebrow" feminine writing, a category that reproduced gendered distinctions between militarized citizenship and the domestic life of feminized consumers. This was a particularly bizarre position for Sandoz, who was one of the few to protest Cold War politicians' use of the Native American to provide an enemy against which "true" American patriots could prevail. Focusing on Sandoz's enthno-biography, Crazy Horse, Clark suggests that Sandoz refigures the American male hero in an effort to make masculinity heterogeneous; the Sioux wars, in Sandoz's work, are less about manliness and heroics than about misunderstandings and betrayals. Sandoz writes from an ethical position borne out of the necessity of witnessing and a communal ideal of freedom, thus battling the totalitarian demagoguery into which her writing was inserted.

Clark's argument is that the activism and critical awareness of a "hidden" American culture populated more by women writers than by men was denied through Cold War hypermasculine rhetoric, particularly in the literary establishment. "Home" was a particularly disparaged site of that hidden culture; while the nuclear family was the axis of Cold War ideology, it was also the site of, quite literally, unspeakable abuse. Le Guin's writings, Clark explains, assert the maternal in an effort to depose the masculine hero of alienation and venerate the heterogeneously gendered hero of community. Concentrating on the Earthsea trilogy and The Dispossessed, Clark explains that Le Guin's writing appeared at a turning point in the Cold War, just before explosive challenges to hypermasculine consensus. Rather than some radical break with the culture of Cold War "home," however, Le Guin's work reflects the fissures of that consensus. Unlike many critics who read Le Guin's work as a postmodern rupture, Clark provocatively insists that we read it in light of continuity—a continuity of home and the maternal—that Cold War rhetoric obscured and that the legacy of Cold War literary criticism makes difficult even today. In any study of gendered hegemony, the temptations are always there: temptations to simplify rather than complicate hegemonic processes; to construct convenient explanations that deny tangled, contradictory historical realities; and to privilege the category of gender over categories of race, class, sexuality, and nationality. Suzanne Clark's Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West works valiantly to resist these temptations. The result is a text admirable in scope and provocative in content. It names what we should resist in contemporary rhetoric and politics, warning us that there is much at stake as our "sensitive kinda" political leaders, in the name of patriotic national identity, make contemporary decisions that will, no doubt, affect us for decades to come.