In one sense, the Committee for the Marshall Plan was exactly what it sounded like: an organization to win support for the Truman administration’s European Recovery Program. But while it seemed like an independent group of civilians, it had close ties to the administration—one of its founding members was Dean Acheson, who was on a brief hiatus from the State Department. Truman clearly felt that his bully pulpit was not enough to sell his foreign policy and called in a little help from his friends.

This is the kind of thing that Chad Levinson dubs The President’s Echo System, and his well-organized book shows that presidents from FDR through to Ronald Reagan engaged in “deliberate programs of collaboration” with these sorts of ostensibly independent civilian groups (p. 17). Through extensive archival research as well as wide-ranging reading in both history and political science, Levinson explores how these groups campaigned in the media and lobbied Congress to support the President’s agenda while maintaining the appearance of independence.

Despite the book’s subtitle, Levinson isn’t seeking to make a simple claim that these collaborations are the key to presidential policy success. In fact, he is rather disinterested in either measuring their effectiveness in moving the public mood or in trying to specifically weigh their contributions to the passage of any particular policy. Instead, by putting them at the center of the story, he seeks to make three broader arguments about the structure of policy debate in the foreign policy field.

First, he wants to explain why “these collaborations have occurred at some moments but not others” (p. 179). His answer focuses on institutionalist logics—presidents turn to extra-governmental organizations when they need Congressional support to accomplish their foreign policy goals, but face either a hostile Congress or a hostile public opinion (or both). In 1964 and 1965, for instance, the LBJ administration rebuffed proposals to establish a civilian group to support the Vietnam War, because the war was popular enough already; both LBJ and Nixon would come to embrace the strategy as support for the war dropped away.

Second, Levinson wants to understand why these extra-governmental organizations tend to favor a more ambitious, hawkish foreign policy. Here, Levinson gives a more historicist answer. There was a striking continuity in the personnel and practices of early extra-governmental organizations: the Committee for the Marshall Plan, for instance, grew out of the Committee for the Defense of America, which had lobbied for intervention in WW2; it later helped sprout the Committee on the Present Danger, which lobbied for Cold War defense policy. And Charles Colson’s work coordinating pro-Vietnam War groups for the Nixon administration helped to both solidify a network of conservative organizations that lived on after Watergate and lay the groundwork for the formalization of an Office of Public Liaison in the Ford White House, which made this kind of coordination permanent. Over time, and because of the institutionalist logics that underpin presidential motivations, these hawkish groups gained credibility through their relationships with administrations with ambitious foreign policies.

Third, Levinson emphasizes presidential influence on these ostensibly civil society groups to “challenge the widely accepted belief that money buys policy in the United States, at least in the domain of national security politics” (p. 32). In the archive, Levinson found no smoking gun evidence of civil groups coercing politicians; if anything, the politicians were in the driver’s seat. But as Levinson himself concedes, this form of evidence is hardly a refutation of the broader point, and readers of this journal might query whether a close study of groups lobbying on behalf of the president is the best place to go for evidence of elite capture of the policy process.

Indeed, more broadly, I think historians may find Levinson’s headline arguments a little underwhelming. Levinson is a political scientist, and the book is written primarily for political scientists; he turns to history primarily to find cases to test hypotheses about institutional logics. That means controlling for a lot of what historians frequently want to focus on. The growing power of unilateral presidential action, for instance, is not a part of this book—defined out of the study on the grounds that presidents in the period didn’t need to build public support for this sort of policy; they could just do it. Similarly, Levinson pays less attention to the broader formations of ideology and political economy that undergird the rise of particular presidencies and their agendas; elections, for instance, are noticeably absent in the book. The book is a narrower, more specific, thing than its subtitle suggests.

That’s not a bad thing. Levinson has found a new, productive angle through which to explore the history of foreign policy; his archival work sheds new light on the political maneuverings behind some important moments. He writes clearly, asks sharp questions, and is exploring a vital theme. In all, The President’s Echo System is a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary field seeking to understand how public debate about foreign policy has been shaped.