Dr. Ingo Trauschweizer
Dr. Ingo Trauschweizer, Associate Professor of History, received two research grants this year: Humanities Research Fund and the Baker Award.
Trauschweizer is spending the 2016-17 academic year on an Ohio University Faculty Fellowship Leave. He is currently conducting research for his current manuscript on Maxwell Taylor, civil-military relations, and U.S. Cold War strategy. The book project is tentatively titled “Cold Warrior: Maxwell Taylor and the Sinews of Power.” He is using the grants fund the research for his book, tentatively titled “Cold Warrior: Maxwell Taylor and the Sinews of Power.”
Who Is Maxwell Taylor?
Taylor—chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy White House insider, and one of the architects of America’s war in Vietnam—was one of the most influential American soldiers, strategists, and diplomats in the 20th century.
Trauschweizer’s Cold Warrior will address Taylor’s role in the making of national strategy as well as his thoughts on nuclear and conventional war and deterrence, on limited war, and on counterinsurgency from 1945 to the 1980s. It promises to yield a new perspective on policy history of the Cold War and the Vietnam War era that combines military, strategic, institutional, intellectual, and international and diplomatic history. Above all, it assesses the importance of individual actors in the process by which strategy and policy are defined and implemented.
Since Taylor served several administrations in different functions, and because he had a knack for showing up in crises and wars (Berlin, Korea, Berlin again, Cuba, and Vietnam), this study depends on a wide range of sources. The award from the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund, $2,200, allows Trauschweizer to conduct research in two collections this winter: the archives at the Citadel (Charleston, SC), where the papers of Taylor’s Korean War commander Mark Clark are housed, and the research library at the University of Georgia, where he will read the papers of Dean Rusk (Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations), Richard Russell (influential Senator and chair of the armed services committee in the 1950s and 1960s), and Martin Hillenbrand (foreign service officer and ambassador).
Planned Archival Visits
Trauschweizer is conducting four research trips this winter and spring, which relate to the second half of his book manuscript on Maxwell Taylor.
More specifically he is investigating Maxwell Taylor’s career at John F. Kennedy’s White House, his relationship with defense secretary Robert S. McNamara and other central actors in the national security and foreign policy realm, his role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from fall 1962 to summer 1964, and his actions and advice as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam in 1964-65, when Lyndon B. Johnson and his military and civilian advisers became more hawkish and the U.S. was drawn into an all-out war.
Researching these experiences and connections has Trauschweizer spending three weeks of research at the National Archives and several military archives in and near Washington, D.C., two weeks in Boston at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library as well as in the papers of U.S. diplomats at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Historical Society, one week at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and an additional two weeks at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas.
By July, Trauschweizer should have completed all archival research for the book. He hopes to have a full draft of his book by the end of 2017.
The Humanities Research Fund is designed to support the research endeavors of Group I faculty members in the humanities departments (Classics, English, History, Linguistics, Modern Languages, Philosophy) and those doing humanities-based research in social science departments (African American Studies, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology & Anthropology, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies) in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Endowed in 1961 by a gift of more than $612,000 from 1926 College of Arts and Sciences graduate Edwin L. Kennedy and his wife, Ruth, a 1930 graduate of the College of Education, The John C. Baker Fund was established to support faculty improvement and research efforts.
For more on Trauscweizer’s research and teaching interests, visit his department profile.
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