Thanks for reply Lionel A.
I think one of the things that particularly irks me about the term is that it sort of strangely subtly um, invites?, the reader to fill in the gap with their own personally biased bogey men.
There’s something really airy fairy about it.
I could write about um, jeez, I dunno, Romanian publishing in the 1890s and how it was influenced by a secret elite that I don’t even identify.
Who might a reader guess is the Secret Elite?
Yanks? Poms? Jews? The yellow peril? Muslims? Communists? Capitalists? Mormons? Sikhs?
Blog writers from Minnesota! Sorry Greg.
It’s just such a dubious terminology.
Who instigated genocide in Tasmania? Secret Elite? Well maybe if a researcher can’t get the sources. Why not say it?
Not only are they secret they good at being secret and so there’s no sources, but rest assured, there’s baddies out there beyond the sources. Cue that twilight zone music.
Who killed JFK? Oh the fuckin capital s Secret Elite of course.
Who pushes vaccinations and fluoride in tapwater? The SECRET ELITE!!!!!!!! SHEEPLES!!!
Who’s hiding aliens and creating the climate change hoax? Yeah the Secret fucking Elite.
Lol! Do you sorta see what I’m getting at Lionel?
I’m trying to imagine say,an authoritive history of say, Micronesian expansion, and have it interspersed with ” Secret Elite “. Fuck that. And for exactly the same reason I’m thinking fuck that about something on WW1.
I do hope you understand.

Oh fuck this weird shit in book titles.

Nothing weird about cap’s appearing appearing in book titles, happens all the time. The bug bear I have with book titles is when the same book has a different title each side of the pond.

As for your beef with ‘Secret Elite’ when one is discussing a loose, almost amorphous group one need a label to pin down the concept. Nothing untoward about this.

As a retired naval guy myself, aviation side, and having once dated a female direct descendent of Nelson as well as having an ancestor on the Victory at Trafalgar I have been studying maritime history fort many decades and the period of the First World War has many strange sequences of events difficult to put down to negligence or tardiness. Such have puzzled me for decades so the book cited makes sense as does its follow up:

Prolonging The Agony

I have a considerably library on the subject and from that I have gleaned how ineffective the Naval blockade was not from any lack of duty of the crews of the tired old cruisers firstly deployed, cruisers of a class of which one member Hawke occidentally rammed RMS Olympic in the Solent before the war.

The dangers faced by the crews when using small open boats in mountainous seas (I have been through those waters and force 10s and 11s not unheard of even in summer) to intern contraband offenders only to have those vessels freed by the Foreign Office without a satisfactory explanation.

One excellent account is by a junior officer Alexander Scrimgeour who’s jottings about his time on the ‘Northern Patrol’ in the old cruiser HMS Crescent have since been published as ‘Scrimgeour’s Scribbling Diary’, which sadly only go as far as 1916 Scrimgour being lost with the battlecruiser Invincible at Jutland.

Ummm. Re my last comment. I felt a little niggle in the back of my mind and checked something at random. Here’s Wikipedia on what I would call Guns, germs, and steel : The fates of human societies.
Except wiki dosnt call it that!!!!!
It’s all capitalised bullshit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

Ummmm Hmmmm grrr.
Oh fuck this weird shit in book titles.

I maintain staunchly that a use of
” Secret Elite ” is pathetic academia.
Hoy Greg, if you perchance were documenting some goings on in some community, would you ever use such a term?
It just seems of paranoid American loonytoons who discuss Jews and banks and chemfuckingtrails.

WTF???
Capital s Secret
Capital e Elite

 ‘Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War ‘ 
Capital h in history.
Capital s in secret ( again!)
Capital o in origins.

Run a fucking mile from such things. The writers have not got the basics so they ain’t gonna have the specifics.
There’s no fucking way an academic who is serious uses a term like Secret Elite unless it’s the name of a person, a self named organisation or club, or a company called the Secret Elite Widget Manufacturing Co.

That said, I’m sure the origins of WW1 are interesting, and indeed very important to document with rigour. Extreme rigour.
Its self evident that people who carry on with capital letters like this , never mind terms like secret elite, ain’t into extreme rigour.
I say this whilst maintaining great respect for the commenter Lionel A.

Li D
Australia

The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal.

The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

LS “If you doubt the truth about US foreign policy”
dean “I’m not sure where you got that from my comment.”

OK Maybe I didn’t express that in the best way, the statement was not aimed at you specifically maybe I should have written:

“If one doubts the truth about US foreign policy…”

…repeated references to “established” and “liberal” positions are too often the code words for a weak argument…

Or not as the case may be.

History that you think you know may be false for the most credentialed of historians can be subject to bias for all manner of reasons some mendacious in intent as is explored in the book ‘Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War ‘ which uncovers cases of History being made, written up and distorted by those immediately involved in fell events. It also describes the ongoing efforts to bury ‘unfortunate records’.

The final chapter of ‘Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War’ informs, a must read:

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Hidden_History_-_Concluding_chapter

The last paragraph rounds things up but do read the whole chapter and also the book if you can. Also look up the works of Professor Carroll Quigley mentioned in the chapter.

“After a century of propaganda, lies and brainwashing about the First World War, cognitive dissonance renders us too uncomfortable to bear the truth that it was a small, socially advantaged group of self-styled English race patriots, backed by powerful industrialists and financiers in Britain and the United States, who caused the First World War. The determination of this London-based Secret Elite to destroy Germany and take control of the world was ultimately responsible for the deaths of millions of honourable young men who were betrayed and sacrificed in a mindless, bloody slaughter to further a dishonourable cause. Today, tens of thousands of war memorials in villages, towns and cities across the world bear witness to the great lie, the betrayal, that they died for ‘the greater glory of God’ and ‘that we might be free’. It is a lie that binds them to a myth. They are remembered in empty roll calls erected to conceal the war’s true purpose. What they deserve is the truth, and we must not fail them in that duty.”

Now I happen to know that Germany had deployed before war was declared continental ferry vessels painted in the colours of a British railway company that used similar ships to effect a disguise to escape detection and sinking whilst dropping mines. One was caught and sunk by a Royal Navy patrol vessel, a scout cruiser, the rescued German survivors of which found themselves, those that had survived this double explosion, in the water again when the RN ship hit one of the mines dropped.

If you doubt the truth about US foreign policy

I’m not sure where you got that from my comment. I am aware of the other things you mention. I don’t trust Stone because his history is to let his philosophy and story-telling flair get in the way of an honest telling, and honest review, of history.

Nor am I surprised that there are people who disagree with Wilentz, but I’m not impressed at all with the article by Schwarz you link to: repeated references to “established” and “liberal” positions are too often the code words for a weak argument, and that’s what Schwartz puts forward (IMO). Not surprising, since Huffington Post is known more as a lightweight site for scientific woo and arguments hewing to political philosophy than fact-based argument.

Nobody here, certainly not me, says or believes the US has been perfect, nor even consistently good or rational, in its foreign policy. I am saying I don’t trust Stone’s representations.

A great book about America’s involvement in Vietnam from the perspective of an American who volunteered to be there from the beginning (~1962) is Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie. John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam”.

Yes, Sheehan is good, if a weighty read. I’d recommend Chickenhawk, Robert Mason’s memoir of his service as a helicopter pilot and Karl Marlantes’ lightly fictionalised memoir Matterhorn also outstanding.

I’m not a fan of Stone’s

One should not judge the book under discussion by any other of Stone’s works, also look at the broader cloth of the book rather than just the post WW2 era. Of course historian’s from ‘traditional’ institutions would not like their versions of history challenged, a version which the y have likely spent a life-time bolstering. It is in the nature of history that the details change when new information or facts come to light. Heck we are still finding new things about operations and mores of the RN during Nelson’s day and even of that man himself.

As for Wilentz, not that I know this historian but here are some words from elsewhere:

Wilentz is pissed off because he understands Untold History is a damning indictment of an entire worldview – that of his political patrons and all comfortable establishment historians like him. And that worldview is genuinely a matter of life and death for all Americans in 2013.”

“…if Wilentz’s understanding of history is correct, U.S. cold war policies should have ended with the cold war itself. If the leftists were right, U.S. policies would have continued almost completely unchanged – except for the pretexts provided to Americans.

Looked at through that lens, Stone and Kuznick’s perspective explains a lot more about the world than that of Wilentz. The Warsaw Pact is gone, but NATO remains, and in fact has expanded eastward. The embargo against Cuba was not lifted at the end of the cold war but intensified. The U.S. habit of supporting overseas coups, both successful (Honduras) and not (Venezuela, Gaza), endures.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-schwarz/sean-wilentz-wrong-on-unt_b_2741853.html

If you doubt the truth about US foreign policy in for example Central and South America then I suggest:

Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
by Greg Grandin

and

Bitter Fruit
The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer

Of course there was Chile, Argentina and more recently Venezuela with Haiti along the way. The US has conducted economic warfare across the globe on an unprecedented scale. As did the European states, especially Britain before them, ‘The Scramble for Africa’ etc.

Back to LBJ, read about his reactions to the USS Liberty massacre by Israel during ‘The Six Day War’ ( good book by Jeremy Bowen by that title) in James Bamford’s ‘Body of Secrets’ Chapter ‘Blood’.

Another book providing the perspective of a North Vietnamese colonel who fought against the Americans is “Following Ho Chi Minh – Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel”, by Bui Tin; (translated from Vietnamese).

And from the perspective of the “peasants” and local folk who bore the burdens of that war: “After Sorrow – An American Among the Vietnamese”, by Lady Borton.