Gaddis Smith's prose is clear and readable. His portrait of the Carter administration's foreign policy is also written as tragedy, but without any insistence that things could have been better. Smith's book rests on no counterfactual premises.

Morality, Reason & Power is a comprehensive study of the Carter Administration's foreign policy which remains manageable because it does not attempt to be exhaustive. As the layout of the book's cover suggests, with its pictures of Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski flanking Jimmy Carter, the book's focus is on the interplay between these three key figures. Starting in 1977 with a mandate to effect "moral" reform in American foreign policy, Jimmy Carter is eventually moved by Soviet aggression and his own self-righteous personality (among other factors) to heed the hard-line advice of Brzezinski and ignore Vance's entreaties for moderation. In Smith's estimation it was tragic that Carter couldn't escape the narrow Cold Warriorism of his predecessors. ( )