Drawing on nearly 150 personal interviews with individuals in the DominicanRepublic and the United States, on rare access to classified U.S. government documents, and on his own first-hand experiences during the crisis, Abraham F. Lowenthal rejects official, liberal, and radical accounts of the intervention. Instead, he explains it as the product of fundamental premises, of decision-making procedures, and of bureaucratic politics. In a new preface, Lowenthal discusses the Dominican intervention in its Cold War context and in comparative and theoretical perspective. As the issue of U.S. military action is raised anew--from Iraq to Bosnia--the lessons of the Dominican crisis will continue to command attention.