The Cold War: A New History
by John Lewis Gaddis
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Book Summary Information
Author: John Lewis GaddisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-12-26
ISBN: 0143038273
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of The Cold War: A New History
Book Review: Excellent, But....
Summary: 5 Stars
John Lewis Gaddis has written a comprehensive general history of the Cold War that fulfills his stated purpose of acquainting a post-Cold War generation with the history of that era. It also allows the longtime history buff a comprehensive perspective with which to assess his own conclusions to date.
For my part, I have few differences to register. Let me mention three of them:
1) In the early 70s, when the Christian Science Monitor was a major newspaper, I found an article detailing the quality of the arms being sent by the Russians to the North Vietnamese in contrast to those being sent to the Egyptians under Anwar Sadat. Item by item, the article authenticated that the former were consistently second rate and the latter first rate, firm grounding for the the Vietnamese's belief that the Soviet Union was concerned to assist them only enough to keep them and the Americans engaged, but not to win.
When Ronald Reagan sent Stinger missiles to the Afghan rebels, I was very concerned that we might try something like that with them in order to stick it to the Soviets. My predilections run that way. Failing to find any evidence to that effect, I was consciously glib in my speculation that since no Communist regime had ever been permanently overthrown, the administration might not know how to calibrate the flow of Stingers for such an effect. Sheer glibness, I knew and I had to accept the administration's innocence.
Though refusing to be ruled by my predilection, I retained it. Then after 9/11, I found out about the interview in the domestic edition of Le Nouvel Observateur for the second week of January, 1998 with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's foreign policy adviser (see Brzezinski / Afghanistan / Le Nouvel Observateur). He said that contrary to CW, our aid to anti-Communist rebels began six months BEFORE the Soviet invasion and was given in the hope of luring them into Afghanistan as a Vietnam quagmire of their own. Professor Gaddis sees the invasion as Soviet retaliation for checks suffered in Europe, as I recall. No indication that he is even aware of the Brzezinski interview. But the reader will note that it sustains my predilection.
2.He seems to think that the Cold War taught our leaders to lie in a way they had not done before. I specifically remember that sometime between 1993-1996, network news hastily reported for one night only that President Clinton had agreed to accede to a Freedom of Information Act request by authorizing the release of documents proving that President Truman okayed experiments exposing American citizens, specifically pregnant women, to nuclear radiation without their knowledge and consent. Not surprisingly the network newscast did not identify, much less interview the party making the request but it must have been Eileen Welsome who would win a Pulitzer Prize for her book on the subject, THE PLUTONIUM FILES. Professor Gaddis gives his full support to the myth of "honest" Harry Truman, Truman the Good. Not a small point when we recall that he led a progressive political party in the fight against fascists whose atrocities included fiendish medical experiments on Jews, Chinese and Koreans. This in turn suggests a deeper and broader perspective that Professor Gaddis might have brought to the work, particularly as he entered his conclusion: the Cold War's belligerents were part of the larger horror of sinister tendancies paralleled THROUGHOUT the fabric of secretive, bureaucratic technological society no doubt EVERYWHERE. In this regard, this fine historian allowed himself to be outclassed by the old X-Files series' very rare Ivy League best.
3. A more respectful difference I have with Professor Gaddis stems from my adherence to the Leninist theory of capitalist imperialism as applied to U.S. foreign policy by the democratic socialist historian, William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber of Cornell. We've been in the eastern Pacific Ocean for about a century-and-a-half and we've always found some reason to be there, all of which boil down to markets -- the need for them acknowledged in public statements (ALL of them vintage Leninism) by a virtually unbroken succession of U.S. presidents, key senators and recognized architects of our foreign policy -- and natural resources (See the Asian section in George F. Kennan's 1948 memorandum on the internet.). No mention of them.
But for the rest, a solid read. Powerful.
Summary of The Cold War: A New History
The ?dean of Cold War historians? (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why?from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own.20th Century Books
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