ABSTRACT
Karl Jack Bauer’s The Mexican War (1974) does describe the United States as the aggressor in the conflict and concedes that President James K. Polk was motivated by the desire to expand the borders to the Pacific. Indeed, there was never any real question about this in either the U.S. or Mexico at that time—or later. He justifies this action by asserting that that this type of expansion was inevitable, and if it had not been carried out by Polk’s administration then some other one would have done it eventually. Although the U.S. president preferred to ...