The United States & the Making of Modern Greece: History & Power, 1950-1974

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The United States & the Making of Modern Greece: History & Power, 1950-1974. By James Edward Miller. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 320 pp.

If anyone is well qualified to write about the history of post-World War II Greek-American relations, it is James Miller. A Foreign Service Institute professor who has trained countless American diplomats en route to Greece and editor of the Foreign Relations of the United States series (published by the U.S. Department of State) as it pertains to Greece, Miller is arguably the person best situated to address the exact nature of American involvement in Greek politics during the Hellenic state's tumultuous Cold War years.

Miller's diplomatic history is broken down into five chapters that capture the time period between 1950 and 1967, when Greece was a dysfunctional democracy, and three chapters that capture the time period between 1967 and 1974, when Greece was a dysfunctional dictatorship. As much has been written on the predictatorship era, it is the last three chapters that are Miller's most important contribution to the …