The Cold War a New History Book Review

Note 1: This book, published by Penguin Press in 2005, was the contempo pick of our book gild for give-and-take. Since it was my husband Jim's option, we were in accuse of food, and in spite of the fact that I didn't much like the volume, at least I had lots of fun planning "cold state of war" food. Equally a bonus, I forgot to accept the brownies to the meeting (decorated with dots to wait like dominos, representing the domino theory of Communism), so nosotros had many leftovers of an endorphin-elevating nature.

Note 2: And yeah, this is the longest postal service in the history of my posts, ever! I wouldn't blame anyone for just looking at the entertaining pictures, or skipping to the pithy decision! (I concede that those who disagree with me on the merit of this book would spell "pithy" with a couple of esses in it…)

The rivalry of the "official" Cold War may accept concluded with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December, 1991, but John Lewis Gaddis nevertheless has an ax to grind. In his mind, the USSR was never annihilation only The Evil Empire, and the U.Due south. never had anything merely practiced intentions. And the most of import factor in striking down that Evil was none other than that alleged towering paragon of strategy and tactics, Ronald Reagan.

The Common cold War: A New History provides an first-class example of the ideological biases of a historian creating a skewed misrepresentation of the facts about an era in gild to adjust with biased perceptions. This so-chosen "new history" is total of sweeping generalizations, unwarranted conclusions, and dubious assertions that scream out bias at every turn. I'grand just going to indicate out a few that irritated me more than the rest.

Gaddis is an unabashed Reagan idolizer, although he himself is the just "authority" he can come up with to footnote when he bestows lavish praises upon Reagan. His thesis is that it was Ronald Reagan, more than than anyone or whatever event, who was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Wedlock and end of the Common cold War. In back up of this dubious accusation, Gaddis asserts: "Reagan was as skillful a pol as the nation had seen for many years, and one of its sharpest grand strategists always." In a sentence worthy of Animal Farm, Gaddis declares about Reagan, "His strength lay in his ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity."

Almost all other accounts tell a dissimilar story. Reagan'south biographer Lou Cannon wrote that Reagan came to the White House "notoriously ill-informed most foreign affairs" and that Bill Clark, his second national security counselor, found that he could merely teach Reagan well-nigh issues by showing him movies.

Robert McFarlane (quoted past Pulitzer Prize winning historian Richard Rhodes, in Arsenals of Folly) explained that the fundamentalist Reagan derived his commitment to strategic defense "primarily from his conventionalities that Armageddon was approaching." McFarlane went on:

"'He sees himself as a romantic, heroic figure who believes in the ability of a hero to overcome fifty-fifty Armageddon. I think information technology may come from Hollywood.' Frank Carlucci, i of Reagan's v national security advisers, confirmed that Reagan was guided in his controlling by the belief that, as Reagan said in 1971, 'Everything is in place for the boxing of Armageddon and the 2d coming of Christ.'"

Without the Bible (or a script) effectually every bit a guide, however, Reagan was in trouble. When he met with Gorbachev, he read from a pocket set of color-coded cue cards he carried, full of clichés. As Rhodes reported, Gorbachev was appalled at Reagan's alphabetize cards with their vapid maxims and his initial unwillingness to engage Gorbachev straight, recalling 'the blank, uncomprehending eyes of the president, who mumbled banalities from a piece of paper.'"

Rhodes tells about the time Reagan dropped his cue cards, and was literally unable to keep with the meeting after that.

But let's get back to the beginning, when the seeds for the Cold State of war were just getting planted. Gaddis traces the intellectual underpinnings of the Cold War, which followed World War II, to the visions of both Wilson and Lenin at the terminate of World War I.

To me, the well-nigh egregious misrepresentation in the volume is the portrait Gaddis paints of Woodrow Wilson, one of the almost reprehensible presidents in our American pantheon. Wilson, yet another president guided by his understanding of the Bible (this characteristic seems to elevate the decision-making process of a president in Gaddis's estimation), is made out by Gaddis to be commonwealth's champion. Wilson, Gaddis explains, saw a world that could be made improve by capitalism, and Lenin saw ane that could be improved by socialism. So far, so skilful. But then Gaddis continues that although both ideologies were meant to offer hope, 1 of them (socialism) depended upon the creation of fear, while the other "had no demand to do so. Therein lay the basic ideological asymmetry of the Cold War."

President Woodrow Wilson

Writing this near Wilson is merely pure, unadulterated garbage. Wilson is the president who, as Globe State of war I began, put into strength a 200,000 fellow member American Protective League, who reported to the Justice Department's new internal security bureau headed past J. Edgar Hoover, and whose mission was to spy on neighbors and coworkers for "loyalty." Another force, the "Infinitesimal Men," ultimately exceeding over 100,000 in number, gave patriotic speeches before meetings, movies, and shows. George Creel, named by Wilson to head the Minute Men, told his workers that "fearfulness was an important chemical element to be bred in the civilian population" (my emphasis). Creel'south arrangement also advised citizens to spy on one some other and "If yous find a disloyal person in your search, requite his name to the Department of Justice in Washington and tell them where to find him."

Wilson's regime arrested union men for "disloyalty," and put socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs in prison house for x years for "opposing the war." Wisconsin Congressman Victor Berger, the kickoff Socialist elected to Congress, was sentenced to 20 years under the Wilson-initiated Espionage Act for doing the same.

[The Espionage Act of June, 1917, made information technology a law-breaking to "convey faux reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies when the Us is at war, to cause or effort to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the war machine or naval forces of the Usa, or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States." The violator of this Act could be fined $x,000 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. In May 1918, Congress at Wilson'southward request increased the government's ability to control stance with the Sedition Human action, which basically was a set of amendments to the Espionage Act. It added to the list of punishable crimes anyone who used "disloyal, scurrilous, profane or abusive language" almost the U.S. government, the war machine, the flag, or the Constitution. The Sedition Act was repealed on Dec 13, 1920, but the Espionage Act is nevertheless in forcefulness.]

Information technology is also true that Wilson'due south devotion to hope and liberty only extended to the "superior" white race. His response to seeing the racist movie "Birth of a Nation" is indicative of his attitude. ["The Birth of A Nation," the highest grossing motion-picture show of the silent film era, portrays blackness men (played past white actors in blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women, and shows the Ku Klux Klan every bit a heroic force.] Reportedly Wilson said, "My only regret is that information technology is all so terribly truthful." When the NAACP tried to take the movie banned, Wilson'due south endorsement was used to promote the motion picture for months, earlier political pressure caused him to dissociate himself from it. But Wilson of course is also the one who allowed his Cabinet leaders to extend segregation throughout the federal hierarchy, telling blackness leaders that information technology would reduce friction and therefore "It is as far as possible from being a movement confronting the Negroes. I sincerely believe it to be in their involvement." (For more on Wilson, run into The Illusion of Victory: America in World State of war I by Thomas Fleming).

Racism is also absent-minded from Gaddis'southward very brief coverage of the McCarthy Era during the Cold War, when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy led a witch hunt against American citizens, and in particular those who had "leftist" sympathies. During the McCarthy era (lasting roughly from the tardily 1940s to the late 1950s), thousands of Americans were accused of being Communists or communist sympathizers and became the discipline of aggressive investigations and questioning earlier regime or individual-manufacture panels, committees and agencies. In spite of inconclusive or questionable bear witness, many people suffered loss of employment, devastation of their careers, and even imprisonment. Some committed suicide. Amid those who lost their jobs was the brilliant J. Robert Oppenheimer, who helped develop the atomic bomb in World War II. His opposition to its continued use and to the development of the hydrogen bomb was seen as "proof" of his disloyalty.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1946

It also happened that many prominent blacks during this time were determined to have leftist sympathies, since vocalizing objections to the treatment of blacks in America was likewise considered disloyal. Amongst those attacked were Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Lena Horne, and W.E.B. DuBois.

This horrible period in American history merits a whole one and one one-half paragraphs in this volume, with Gaddis's summarizing it by commenting: "with the onset of McCarthyism in the United States and with irrefutable evidence that espionage had taken place on both sides of the Atlantic…." In other words, information technology wasn't so bad, and anyway, McCarthy was correct.

The entire orientation of this book is that the U.S. was a largely innocent force of good in the world, and the USSR wanted zip more than than to sabotage the American way of life. But the so-called American way of life was (1) only open to whites; (2) only free to the extent the authorities decided to allow information technology at whatsoever one time; and (3) characterized by organizations dedicated to spying and sabotage that were every bit as nefarious as those operating in the Soviet Wedlock.

George Kennan, whose 1946 analysis of the Soviet Union became the basis for U.S. Cold State of war strategy, stated that he "believed that the American focus on the Russian armed services threat was a misguided American projection onto Russia of a danger that would confer legitimacy on the continued being of the immense war machine establishment that the formerly isolationist United States had built upwards during the war." ("Wise Men Against the Grain," William Pfaff, NYReview of Books, June ix, 2011)

Credit: Richard Cole, in Z Mag

Years afterward the fact, "tidbits" become admitted, such as:

• The overthrow of the democratically-elected-merely-leftist Iranian Prime number Minister Mossadegh in the 1950'south [this mission led by none other than Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of Theodore, and the blowback for which included the taking of American hostages in 1979];

• Performance Northwoods, a 1962 plan drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for terrorist attacks on Americans secretly committed by the U.S. but blamed on the Cubans to justify an attack on Cuba;

• The CIA-backed ouster of the democratically elected leftist President Allende of Chile in 1973;

• CIA-backed Contra invasions in Nicaragua directed by Reagan in the 1980'due south; [In 1984 the CIA mined iii Nicaraguan harbors. Nicaragua took this activeness to the Globe Courtroom, for which an $18 billion judgment was rendered against the U.South. In response, the U.South. refused to recognize the Courtroom's jurisdiction in the example.]

One could keep and on. (Run into, for example, this New York Times editorial "Russian federation Isn't the But 1 Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too.")

None of these episodes are explored by Gaddis. His recital of Cold State of war crimes is nearly exclusively express to those committed by the USSR.

Gaddis continues his biased reporting into the mod era. He devotes considerable verbiage to the multiple crises in the early 1960's, attributing arraign on Krushchev for bringing us to the brink of nuclear war. Yet Frederick Kempe, in his convincing analysis of John F. Kennedy'south contributions to the Cold War (Berlin 1961), concludes that:

"Kennedy'southward indecisiveness in the early states of the [Berlin wall] crisis produced the wall itself, an exponential increase in East-West tension, and, in the half-century that followed, other fateful consequences that included the Cuban missile crunch…"

Yes, it was Krushchev who sent the missiles to Republic of cuba. But Krushchev also needed to restore his prestige after Kennedy approved "The Bay of Pigs Invasion." The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful invasion of Republic of cuba past a CIA-trained forcefulness of Cuban exiles, with support and encouragement from the US government, in an try to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The invasion was launched in Apr 1961, less than iii months afterwards John F. Kennedy causeless the presidency in the U.s.a.. (Nixon proposed it, Eisenhower planned it, and Kennedy approved information technology.)

Gaddis, nonetheless, claims that all the blame should be laid on the door of Krushchev; it was he who did non recall things through, and "immune his ideological romanticism to overrun whatsoever chapters he had for strategic analysis." [Sounds to me like an analysis of The Bay of Pigs invasion….] "He was like a petulant child," Gaddis asserts, and claims that Khrushchev got some of what he wanted "equally children sometimes do." There was no suggestion whatsoever that the mistake was at to the lowest degree in part due to Kennedy's blunders rather than Krushchev'south tantrums.

(Gaddis claims that the Cuban missile crisis is "universally regarded now equally the closest the world came, during the second half of the 20th century, to a third world war…" This is obviously untrue, yet, and represents nonetheless another endeavour by Gaddis to put the onus for irrationally risky behavior on the Soviets. In 1983, a nine-day NATO military exercise designated ABLE ARCHER 83 came closer. The drill turned out to be different from previous ones, and a flake too realistic. Robert Gates is amid those who observes that the KGB was convinced American forces had begun a countdown to nuclear war. The Soviets took a number of steps to enhance their armed forces readiness brusque of mobilization. Later, Reagan was "surprised and shocked that the Soviets had taken his years of militant rhetoric and his massive artillery buildup seriously." (Gates, Robert M., From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of 5 Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, 1996, and Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly.) As British author Fred Inglis points out (The Cruel Peace: Everyday Life and the Cold War):

"The strange policy of the Reagan years turned out to be an unappetizing mixture of grudging hypercaution at the arms limitation negotiating tables, reckless and unendearing braggartry in forepart of the microphones, and pocket-size acts of war that combined bullying and cowardice in well-nigh equal proportions."

Mikhail Gorbachev, Fourth dimension'due south Human being of the Decade

As for Gorbachev, whose brilliance and vision is noted by other historians, Gaddis is cavalier, charging that U.Southward. Secretarial assistant of Land Shultz had to "educate" Gorbachev on economics. (Here he footnotes Shultz's self-serving memoirs.) Gaddis even goes so far as to aver that when Gorbechev made a dramatic speech, he was "borrowing a play a joke on from Reagan." Adept grief! And finally, he holds that Gorbachev, who was was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his function in ending the Cold War, "was never a leader in the manner of Vaclav Havel, John Paul II, Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Walesa – fifty-fifty Boris Yeltsin." Boris YELTSIN? Come on! As Neil MacFarlane, professor of international relations at Oxford says of Yeltsin, "his record of governance is pretty mixed, and the government was essentially weakened during his fourth dimension." It was besides Yeltsin who failed to control the growing political influence of wealthy oligarchs who withal wield inordinate power in Russia. After Yeltsin's death, the Economist reported that:

"Mr Yeltsin's slap-up rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, reflected the mood of most Russians when, amongst the polite tributes and saccharine television set montages, he alluded to the expressionless human being's 'serious mistakes.' Mr. Yeltsin's had been a 'tragic fate,' said Mr Gorbachev. Fifty-fifty before he left role, a bulk of Russians, from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, despised him, partly on account of the raging inflation, unpaid salaries and oligarchic larceny of his rule, only even more for the shame many thought he brought on Russia through his clownish drunkenness."

Information technology is apparent that for Gaddis to elevate the role of Gorbachev, fifty-fifty over Yeltsin, would be to diminish the role of Reagan, a path the author wants to avoid. In Rhodes'south history of the Cold War, all the same, Gorbachev is the incontrovertible hero of the situation.

Gaddis begins and ends his book with a discussion of the nature of war, every bit part of his eventual argument that the Common cold War changed that nature forever. He cites Thucydides who predicted that in that location would always be a propensity for violence, "human nature existence what it is." Gaddis draws the ridiculous conclusion, however, that because of the success of the political game strategy Common Assured Destruction (or MAD), "Contrary to the lesson Thucydides drew from the greatest war of his time, human being nature did change – and the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began the process by which it did and then." What?!!! MAD is a strategy that in fact is based on the inevitability of violence, that posits that only by each side holding a gun to each other'southward head simultaneously (and assuming participation by rational actors), would that violence be deterred. Note: the violence is deterred past a rational adding of odds. There is no alter in propensity! The relentless continuation of wars and skirmishes since the Cold War make manifest the utter applesauce of Gaddis'south argument.

Raytheon's AMRAAM Missiles

Gaddis has two main conclusions almost the Common cold War in full general. One is that the Cold War is "the betoken at which armed forces strength, a defining characteristic of 'ability' itself for the past five centuries, ceased to be that." Gosh, that'south not what the armed services-industrial complex thinks. I wonder if Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, and then on have heard the news…. The 2d is that the Cold War "disproved Marx's indictment of capitalism as elevating greed to a higher place all else." I'g glad to hear that. All those CEOs making millions and the bankers taking advantage of the poor'due south desire for housing in order to ensure their own enrichment are just aberrations. Thank heavens!

Evaluation: Beware of books claiming to be history books! This one doesn't meet the near basic criteria of objective reporting of the facts.

Rating: 1.five/5

Published by Penguin Press, 2005

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Source: https://rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/review-of-%E2%80%9Cthe-cold-war-a-new-history%E2%80%9D-by-john-lewis-gaddis/

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