Sandbrook, Dominic

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SANDBROOK, Dominic

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Balliol College, Oxford University, M.A.; University of St. Andrews, M.Litt.; Cambridge University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—c/o University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Historian. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England, professor of history, 2001—.

WRITINGS:

Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Never Had It So Good: Britain from Suez to the Beatles; Britain in the Sixties, 1956-63, for Little, Brown.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian Dominic Sandbrook's primary interests are in U.S. history after 1945, particularly the political history of the 1960s and 1970s. Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism is based on his doctoral thesis for Cambridge University, for which he won the Sara Norton Prize. Sandbrook uses McCarthy's career to focus on the rise and fall of liberalism following World War II, tracing the senator's progress from teacher to politician. In 1999 Sandbrook conducted two interviews with McCarthy to further his insight.

McCarthy, elected to Congress in 1948, entered the political arena amid the liberal postwar atmosphere. Theron Westervelt, in a review for the American Statesman, observed that "by examining McCarthy, Sandbrook identifies and illustrates the elements on which the old, postwar consensus was founded." Among these elements were a commitment to anticommunism and a belief in the principles of the Fair Deal. Sandbrook follows McCarthy's progress through his failed attempt at the presidency and the unraveling of his career that resulted from the change in political atmosphere. Westervelt concluded that "Sandbrook has done a good job presenting" the postwar political era but "was not so successful at uncovering McCarthy himself."

Sandbrook raises a number of questions about the choices McCarthy made, particularly regarding his challenge of Democratic incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. In the Nation, Jon Wiener noted that McCarthy "had never been a maverick, a rebel or a peacenik. Throughout his career in the House and Senate before 1968, Sandbrook shows, he had been a conventional cold war liberal, fiercely anti-Communist and voting the AFL-CIO line on domestic issues." Wiener added that "Sandbrook's massively researched and footnoted book is soft on the socio-political context, and hard in its conclusion: McCarthy wasted his talent.… Readers may disagree about 1968, but Sandbrook is effective in" arguing his case. A contributor for Kirkus Reviews called Eugene McCarthy "a worthy reexamination of the politician whom many remember fondly today." McCarthy refused to bow out on his political career gracefully. In a review for the Boston Globe, correspondent Michael Kenney stated that "Sandbrook passes unsparingly over McCarthy's long political exile, during which he periodically resurfaced as an increasingly embarrassing candidate for president, or to return to Congress."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Enterprise, September, 2004, Theron Westervelt, "Knowing McCarthy, Hating Him," p. 56.

Booklist, March 15, 2004, Mary Carroll, review of Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, p. 1261.

Boston Globe, May 11, 2004, Michael Kenney, "Shedding Light on Liberalism through the Prism of Eugene McCarthy," p. E6.

Commonweal, August 13, 2004, John T. McGreevy, "One of a Kind," p. 29.

Harper's, April, 2004, p. 85.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2004, review of Eugene McCarthy, p. 122.

Library Journal, March 15, 2004, Karl Helicher, review of Eugene McCarthy, p. 90.

Nation, May 3, 2004, Jon Wiener, "No Success like Failure," p. 50.

Publishers Weekly, February 16, 2004, review of Eugene McCarthy, p. 165.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 28, 2004, Stanley I. Kutler, "Biography Gives Context to Life of a Liberal Icon: Vietnam War Foe Eugene McCarthy," p. 3.

Washington Monthly, May, 2004, Adam Clymer, "The First Spoiler: Before Ralph Nader, There Was Eugene McCarthy," p. 51.