The Cold War

Helsinki became, in short, a legal and moral trap. Having pressed the United States and its allies to commit themselves in writing to recognizing existing boundaries in Eastern Europe, Brezhnev could hardly repudiate what he had agreed to in the same document - also in writing - with respect to human rights. Without realizing the implications, he thereby handed his critics a standard, based on the universal principles of justice, rooted in international law, independent of Marxist-Leninist ideology, against which they could evaluate the behavior of his and other communist regimes. What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems -- at least the more courageous -- could claim official permission to say what they thought.

"[Reagan] was the only nuclear abolitionist ever to have been President of the United States. He made no secret of this, but the possibility that a right-wing Republican anti-communist pro-military chief executive could also be an anti-nuclear activist defies so many stereotypes that hardly anyone noticed Reagan's repeated promises, as he put it in the "evil empire" speech, "to keep America strong and free, while we negotiate real and verifiable reductions in the world's nuclear arsenals and one day, with God's help, their total elimination."

After returning from Moscow [Egon] Krenze consulted his colleagues, and on November 9th they decided to try and relieve the mounting tension in East Germany by relaxing -- NOT eliminating -- the rules restricting travel to the West. The hastily drafted decree was handed to Gunger Schabowski, a Politburo member who had not been at the meeting but was about to brief the press. Schabowski glanced at it, also hastily , and then announced that citizens of the G.D.R. were free to leave "through any of the border crossings." The surprised reporters asked when the new ruling went into effect. Shuffling through his papers, Schabowski replied: "[A]ccording ot my new information, immediately." Were the rules valid for travel to West Berlin? Schabowski frowned, shrugged his shoulders, shuffled some more papers, and then replied: "Permanent exist can take place via all border crossings from the G.D.R. to [West Germany] and West Berlin, respectively. The next question was: "What is going to happen to the Berlin Wall now?" Schabowski mumbled an incoherent response, and closed the press conference. Within minutes, the word went out that the wall was open.

Thus, while it may seem tempting to dismiss John Lewis Gaddis's history of the cold war as a naively self-congratulatory account that leaves out much of what makes its subject interesting and of continuing relevance, that would be a mistake. Gaddis's version is perfectly adapted for contemporary America: an anxious country curiously detached from its own past as well as from the rest of the world and hungry for "a fireside fairytale with a happy ending."[footnote] The Cold War: A New History is likely to be widely read in the U.S.: both as history and, in the admiring words of a blurb on the dust jacket, for the "lessons" it can teach us in how to "deal with new threats". That is a depressing thought.

Gaddis, understandably enough, took umbrage at my lack of enthusiasm for his latest and most commercially successful account of the cold war decades; but the fact remains that his book contributes significantly to widespread misunderstanding and ignorance in the U.S. concerning the nature of the cold war, the way it ended, and its troubling, unfinished legacies at home and abroad.

Gaddis, professor of history at Yale and the Cold War's preeminent historian, delivers a concise, readable introduction to an era about which Americans have increasingly little recollection. The author has had the somewhat unusual opportunity to examine his period of expertise both from within__in his books Strategies of Containment (1982) and The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987), for instance__and now, with the benefit of new archival documents and hindsight, as a s

Gaddis, professor of history at Yale and the Cold War's preeminent historian, delivers a concise, readable introduction to an era about which Americans have increasingly little recollection. The author has had the somewhat unusual opportunity to examine his period of expertise both from within__in his books Strategies of Containment (1982) and The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987), for instance__and now, with the benefit of new archival documents and hindsight, as a series of historical events. Although the relative brevity of the volume might suggest that Gaddis values concision over detail, the study gives new focus and meaning to one of the United States' watershed periods.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.