His research interests include US diplomatic history and intelligence, and he is notable especially for his studies of the role of the CIA in coups and nation building in Latin America.
Cullather graduated from Indiana University (AB 1981) before working as press secretary for US Representative Lee H. Hamilton in the 1980s.
Cullather's study, according to Lars Schoultz, is "an exceptionally valuable document-not simply a lucid chronicle of who did what to whom, but a vivid cautionary tale about how the cloak of secrecy allowed government officials to avoid questions of perspective, of proportion, and of right and wrong".
[3] Historian Greg Grandin called it "an extremely important scholarly and pedagogical work".
He argued that these relations were not as dominated by the United States as conventional wisdom dictates, that the client-patron relationship is often a complicated dynamic[7] (for instance, the US were interested in military bases while the Philippines sought to control their own economy[8]), and that "American influence--so often portrayed as fact in United States documents--is in many ways illusory".