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Abstract
This article is a historiographic review of the literature on the Olympic Games and the Cold War. The topic has been a growth area among scholars of both diplomatic history and the history of sports over the past three decades. Most of the literature has been in English, but a significant amount of work has appeared in French, German, and a few other languages. Despite the proliferation and richness of the historiography, some large gaps in coverage still exist, and some important issues still need to be explored.

The Battle of Okinawa was the last major ground battle of World War ii. The Tenth u.s. Army that invaded this small piece of Japan was a unique force composed of units from the u.s. Army and others from the u.s. Marine Corps. Much historical literature has focused on the different approaches to ground combat of the two armed services, but they also employed very different policies towards support of the news media. The u.s. Marines were much more supportive than the u.s. Army. The two different policies and styles of news coverage that reporters employed led to coverage favoring the u.s. Marines. Reporting suggested that u.s. Marine procedures were less costly in lives and created enormous concern in the United States about casualty rates, motivating President Harry S. Truman to hold an Oval Office meeting to re-think strategy in the Pacific theater. It would be wrong, though, to argue that the media altered the course of the war. Truman asked hard probing questions about the direction of the war, but General of the Army George C. Marshall acted to ensure that the United States stayed on its current strategic path.

The United States occupied the Japanese island of Okinawa as a colony in everything but name for twenty-seven years after World War II ended in August 1945. This action ran counter to the avowed U.S. foreign policy principle of self-determination. Novelist Vern Sneider, a former U.S. Army civil affairs officer who had been stationed on the island during the postwar years, was a critic of the occupation. For that reason he chose to use his first novel The Teahouse of the August Moon, published in 1951, to offer a critique of policies that he believed were ethnocentric and counterproductive to U.S. national interests. Although Teahouse grew in popularity in the United States as it became a play and then a theatrical film, it failed to have any influence on U.S. foreign policy. This was because playwright John Patrick removed the critique as he adapted the story for these different media formats. The Teahouse story does show, however, how world affairs can provide issues that engage large sections of the American public at many different levels.