It might be said that Ulysses S. Grant’s memoir killed him. The Civil War General and former President of the United States had no intention of writing a memoir. In a life so full of personal and professional crises, one final personal crisis compelled Grant to break his silence. A twenty nine-year-old charlatan, Ferdinand Ward, had defrauded Grant
The Pacificus-Helvidius debate, as the late Morton J. Frisch wrote, in many ways defined the parameters of the seemingly permanent constitutional controversy between the executive and legislature over primary control of American national security policy.
When Soviet behavior in the late 1940s indicated that Stalin had not grasped this essential geopolitical point, American officials, consciously or not, applied the logic of Spykman's conclusions against Moscow when developing the national security policy known as containment.