The Languages of Edison's Light (review)

making and then uses their conclusions as a standard through the book. Likewise, he downplays distinctions between initiatives with arguably adequate Congressional sanction and those lacking authorization. Thus, for example, while DeConde includes John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 1993), in his bibliography, he fails to examine Ely’s plausible distinction between the largely open war in Vietnam and the largely secret operations against Laos and Cambodia. The book’s title identiŽ es DeConde’s primary foray into interdisciplinary history. “Macho” and “machismo” regularly appear as terms of both description and psychological explanation. They refer to “a selfconsciously tough individual who  aunts virility, disparages feminine behavior, and cherishes faith in manhood . . . [and they] connot[e] an exaggerated masculine pride, an admiration of physical aggressiveness, and an entitlement to dominate, associated often with military violence” (4–5). DeConde portrays American presidents as almost universally acting in a “macho” manner; he applies the terms and the underlying concept to such arguably different presidential approaches in the nationalsecurity arena as Theodore Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s and Jimmy Carter’s and Reagan’s. In recent decades the words themselves seem, too, to have been used increasingly by public and academic critics of presidential unilateralism. Both the introduction and conclusion discuss the reasons for the persistence of presidential machismo. Not the least is its public appeal, as re ected in the polling data that the book’s later chapters usefully mine for the period since the 1930s. DeConde also notes debates among social scientists about possible genetic and cultural roots of the behavior, but he resists any deŽ nitive or systematic evaluation of either the endurance of the trait or the explanatory power of the concept. Nor does he push far in distinguishing between machismo as a descriptive category and as an explanatory tool, or between machismo and related concepts (for example, a sense of the presidential ofŽ ce for its occupants, or patriotism for the public). This is not a theoretically or analytically heavy book, nor, I suspect, was it intended to be.