He attended Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, then earned a degree in engineering at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.
After serving in the South Pacific as an executive officer aboard a Landing Ship Medium, he was stationed in Corpus Christi, Texas, where he made plans to become an aviator like his father.
He earned a master's degree and a PhD there and came under the influence of the Beardian historians, especially Fred Harvey Harrington, Merle Curti, and Howard K. Beale.
[5] When Fred Harvey Harrington became the chair of the history department at the University of Wisconsin in 1957, he arranged for an unusual direct appointment of Williams as his replacement in teaching U.S. foreign relations.
Like Williams, its articles offered a critique of the dominant liberalism, but after it moved to offices to New York in 1963, the club reflected less of his thinking and gradually declined and expired.
[7] Williams argued that American politicians, fearful of a loss of markets in Europe, had exaggerated the threat of world domination from the Soviet Union.
According to a review by Richard A. Melanson,[9] focusing particularly on Williams' historiography, "his influence on a generation of American diplomatic historians has remained strong."
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.
[10] While teaching at Oregon State University, Williams "called for a return to the Articles of Confederation and a radical decentralization of political and economic power".
[13][14] Always a bit eccentric and not a little idiosyncratic, Williams gave his interpretation of the nation's past a moralistic tone, finding soul mates in conservatives like John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover.
In 1974, for instance, N. Gordon Levin Jr., compared Williams to Beard and argued that the Open Door model "is inadequate because it insists on forcing all political-moral and strategic motivations" for American foreign policy into "the Procrustean confines" of relentless economic expansion.
Maddox in The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War criticized Williams, Lloyd Gardner, and other revisionist scholars for alleged pervasive misuse of historical source documents and for a general lack of objectivity.
In 1986, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whom Williams always distrusted for his closeness to power brokers, criticized him from a liberal perspective in The Cycles of American History.
[19] Bacevich brought into discussion the Vietnam anti-war movement coupled with the emergence of the 'New Left' which surprisingly disappointed Williams, insinuating that the consequences made by the American people were unavoidable issues for the future.
[23]' Thompson echoes this school of thought, claiming that Williams' line of argument toward American Foreign Policy "has always been an expansionist, imperialist power."