of the United States in Latin America, Africa, or Asia. In the context of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, he went out of his way in an expanded second edition of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1962) to strongly criticize the behavior of the Soviet Union, but he noted the Kennedy Administration's Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba as a parallel behavior. The difference in domestic policy between Stalin's Soviet Union and American democracy, he argued, made the U.S. embrace of empire all the more "tragic." Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is often described as one of the most influential books written on American foreign policy. Bradford Perkins, a traditionalist diplomatic historian emeritus at the University of Michigan, said this in a twenty-five-year retrospective on Tragedy: "The influence of William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy... is beyond challenge". Tragedy brought Williams to the attention of not only academics but also American policymakers. Adolf A. Berle, a former member of FDR's Brain Trust, was quite impressed with Williams after reading Tragedy and meeting him in person in Madison asked if he would be his "personal first assistant" in the new position Berle had taken in the Kennedy Administration as the head of an interdepartmental task force on Latin America. Williams turned down the offer to serve in the Kennedy Administration and later claimed that he was glad he had because of Kennedy's sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Williams' historical success is consequent of his revisionist school of thought. His unorthodox ideology has become more recognised and celebrated since the book 'The Tragedy of American Diplomacy'. According to a review by Richard A. Melanson, focusing particularly on Williams' historiography, "his influence on a generation of American diplomatic historians has remained strong." Critic of Vietnam War Williams inspired a generation of historians to re-think the Cold War and was a critic of the Vietnam War. These included Gar Alperovitz, Lloyd Gardner, Patrick J. Hearden, Gabriel Kolko, Walter LaFeber, and Thomas J. McCormick, who, along with Williams, argued that the Vietnam War was neither democratizing nor liberating, but was an attempt to spread American dominance. He later edited a book of readings together with Gardner, LaFeber, and McCormick (who had taken his place at UW–Madison when Williams left to teach in Oregon) called America in Vietnam: A Documentary History in 1989. During the 1960s, Williams' work became