Book Description

Chester Bowles' public career spans twenty-nine years in an exceptionally wide range of activities. He has served six presidents, held state and federal offices, in wartime and in peace, at home and abroad. He has long been one of America's outstanding liberal spokesmen. Professor Henry Steele Commanger has cited Mr. Bowles as the best example of a "new kind of public servant," a man "who considers himself not exclusively the spokesman of a particular interest, or economy, or political system, but of the interests of man." Yet Promises to Keep is more than the record of one man's public career. It is also the story of the currents of change and of the opposition to change that have characterized America since Pearl Harbor. Mr. Bowles' readiness to challenge deeply rooted special interests, to advocate unpopular positions, and to speak out for what he believes in has brought him into frequent conflict with some fo the highest officials in our government. His memoirs tell the story of these conflicts in full. As OPA Administrator during World War II, Mr. Bowles and the remarkable organization which he created successfully "held the line" against inflation, battling lobbyists, other government officials and members of Congress in the process. Later, as Governor of Connecticut, he introduced far-reaching legislation to reorganize the archaic state government and to bring it closer to the people. Although many of his "radical" proposals were blocked during his term of office, most of them were subsequently enacted into law. As President Kennedy's Under Secretary of State, Mr. Bowles was largely responsible for bringing into diplomatic service a "new breed" of ambassador. But his efforts to introduce fresh thinking in the tradition-bound State Department ran into heavy weather. Mr. Bowles was the key figure in the New Frontier's first major reshuffling of high-level officials. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. worte in A Thousand Days, "Bowles [was] the hapless victim of the conditions which he diagnosed better than anyone else." He has also been one of the very few men who from the beginning sensed the danger of our growing involvement in Indochina and offered alternative policies. Keenly aware of the attitudes and aspirations of the people of Asia, he here expresses views sharply critical of U.S. foreign policy and charges that America has failed to understand and act on the forces shaping the non-Western world. These memoirs, written with characteristic personal warmth, evoke three decades of crucial importance. Yet, as Mr. Bowles writes, "the cycle of success and failure which I shall describe should be considered not as nostalgia for old battles won or lost, but as the first skirmishes of the struggle which lies ahead."