The Cold War: A New History (Paperback)

~ (Author) "This was The way the war was supposed to end: with cheers, handshakes, dancing, drinking, and hope..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, Soviet Union, Eastern Europe (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gregory and Sklar, reading Yale history professor Gaddis's study of the American-Soviet standoff, give voice to their inner television announcer, their twin brands of masculine sonorousness verging on virile parody before settling comfortably on the side of familiar voice-over solidity. Gaddis's work unravels the tangled threads of the Cold War, from the tense Allied conferences at the end of WWII to the Korean War and onward, and his book's readers give it the sensation of every word being carefully cultivated and primped before being spoken. If this leads to some of the immediacy, the heart-in-throat sensation, of the events described being diluted, so be it, for Gregory and Sklar give Gaddis's book the grandeur its subject matter so richly deserves. Sounding more professorial, in the I-play-an-Ivy-League-professor-on-television sort of way, than the good professor himself, Gregory and Sklar do an admirable job of making Gaddis's learned words their own.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The Washington Post

When China's People's Liberation Army suddenly crossed the Yalu River during the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered atomic weapons to be dropped on the Chinese troops. The Soviet Union responded with nuclear attacks on the South Korean cities of Pusan and Inchon. The Americans countered by wiping out Vladivostok and two Chinese cities; the Soviets, in turn, bombed Frankfurt and Hamburg.

All of the above is sheer fiction, of course; no country has used nuclear weapons in wartime since the United States destroyed Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. But in a couple of horrific paragraphs in John Lewis Gaddis's new book, The Cold War, this scenario is presented in straightforward fashion within the otherwise factual narrative, until eventually the author acknowledges the put-on.

This is Gaddis's unconventional way of making an important point: The Cold War was historically significant as much for what didn't happen as for what did. Terrifying though the great global showdown sometimes was, the United States and the Soviet Union never waged a full-scale war. "Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape," Gaddis notes. But nuclear weapons meant that "for the first time in history no one could be sure of winning, or even surviving, a great war." And so the hot wars the superpowers and their proxies fought -- such as Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan -- were limited in scope.

Gaddis, who teaches history at Yale University, is America's most prominent Cold War historian. He first emerged 34 years ago as a leader of the "post-revisionist" school of Cold War history. The earliest group of historians writing about the Cold War had blamed its origins largely on Joseph Stalin's desire for Soviet domination of Europe. In the late 1950s and '60s, a revisionist school, led by William Appleman Williams of the University of Wisconsin, argued that the Cold War was primarily an outgrowth of American economic interests, which led Moscow to react defensively to potential U.S. encroachment in its backyard.

Enter Gaddis. Rejecting both contentions, his 1972 book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, portrayed the origins of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union less as the lone fault of one side or the other and more as the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. Gaddis has explored the Cold War in six other books since then, and, in the process, his views have evolved -- most notably in We Now Know (1997), which was rooted in newly opened Soviet archives. Particularly after the Soviet collapse, he has stressed the significance of democratic values and America's ability to deal with its allies in a profoundly more decent fashion than the Soviet Union treated Eastern Europe. In effect, Gaddis has swung back nearly to where the early Cold War historians started by putting the onus of blame on Stalin and the brutal nature of his regime.

Gaddis's latest book boils down the history of the entire Cold War to a sometimes brilliant 266 pages of text, in trenchant, lucid prose intended not for historians and specialists but for ordinary readers. He has not done much new archival field work to produce this new synthesis, and, at times, he relies heavily on his previous work. Yet to Gaddis's credit, he does not merely rewrite himself or retrace the main events from 1946 to 1991. Instead, he stretches to find new ways (like his startling Korean counterfactual above) to cover the subject, stepping back and looking at the entire period with distance and perspective.

Gaddis opens The Cold War, for example, not in Moscow, Washington or Eastern Europe but on an island off the coast of Scotland, where a sickly, depressed English writer named Eric Blair, writing under the pen name of George Orwell, sat down to write his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the classic portrait of a world of totalitarianism. "It is worth starting with visions . . . because they establish hopes and fears," Gaddis explains. "History then determines which prevail." In the closing pages, he concludes that the Cold War "began with a return of fear and ended in a triumph of hope, an unusual trajectory for great historical upheavals."

Gaddis's efforts at imaginative writing are not always successful. The fictitious passage on the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War, for example, is so out of character with the rest of the book that it leaves the stunned reader wondering what on earth is going on. His concluding chapter mystifyingly diverts into a dissertation on how the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage shows the hazards of historical judgment.

Gaddis is also clearly much better at writing about the early Cold War, from the 1940s through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, than at dealing with later periods. When he covers the origins of the U.S.-Soviet conflict, his narrative is full of confident, trenchant analysis. Examining how the United States in the 1950s rejected the idea of limited nuclear war, for example, he calls Dwight D. Eisenhower "the most subtle and brutal strategist of the nuclear age. . . . [He] insisted on planning only for total war. His purpose was to make sure that no war at all would take place."

When Gaddis gets to the late 1960s and '70s, by contrast, he offers fewer insights and seems to be hurrying to cover everything. He bogs down in the details of events such as the late-1970s conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia, even though he later acknowledges it didn't affect the larger picture of the Cold War. His way of introducing the revolts against established authority in places like the United States and France in the late 1960s is to describe how China's Mao Zedong once complained that the young, rampaging Chinese Red Guards wouldn't listen to him -- a bizarre example, since, as Gaddis later admits, it was Mao who had goaded the Red Guards to rebel in the first place.

Gaddis places particular stress on the role of ideology, notably the failures of Marxism-Leninism to predict how people and countries would behave. Class struggle didn't emerge in the way that the communists' theorists had anticipated, and, to Stalin's surprise, the major Western powers cooperated with one another for decades rather than going to war over economic issues. "This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any single, sacrosanct, and therefore unchallengeable theory of history," Gaddis concludes.

The main heroes of his story are those who challenged the Soviet regime in the realm of ideas and values, such as Orwell, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel and Pope John Paul II. On questions of grand strategy, Gaddis gives great weight to George F. Kennan (who died last year at the age of 101), the brilliant American diplomat who wrote the famous "long telegram" of 1946 and the anonymous 1947 "X" article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which together explained the sources of Soviet behavior and laid the foundations for the American policy of containment. (Gaddis, who is writing Kennan's biography, dedicates The Cold War to him.)

Gaddis is markedly less enthusiastic about Western leaders who sought a working accommodation with Soviet communism without challenging its legitimacy. For instance, he carefully explores the strategic thinking of Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, giving credit (too much credit, in fact) to some of their secret, balance-of-power diplomacy. But he then concludes that their push for détente with Moscow reflected "a kind of moral anesthesia. . . . In its search for geopolitical stability, the Nixon administration had begun to support domestic stability inside the U.S.S.R." -- thus spurning dissidents and prophets like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.

Such challengers got their way in the end, though. The Cold War resulted in the discrediting of dictatorships around the world and "the globalization of democracy," Gaddis writes. "Promoting democracy became the most visible way that the Americans and their Western European allies could differentiate themselves from their Marxist-Leninist rivals."

Because of these views, Gaddis has become a favorite historian of the George W. Bush administration, which, of course, is now seeking to promote democracy in the Middle East. A year ago, Gaddis was called to the White House to offer his ideas before Bush delivered his second inaugural, which gave ever-greater stress to the importance of democracy.

In his other writings, Gaddis has become a qualified supporter of the Bush administration's strategy in combating terrorism. While criticizing the administration's unilateralism in Bush's first term, he has given credit to the idea of preemptive or even preventive warfare, arguing that the Sept. 11 attacks showed that Washington required a new strategy for a new era. "That event revealed a category of threats so difficult to detect and yet so devastating if carried out that the United States had little choice but to use pre-emptive means to prevent their emergence," he wrote in Foreign Affairs a year ago.

And yet Gaddis's conclusions in his new book call into question other aspects of the current administration's thinking. Several of the administration's leading officials, starting with Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, started their careers and developed their ideas during the Cold War. They have emphasized, above all, the importance of American military power. But Gaddis draws the opposite lesson. "The Cold War may well be remembered, then, as the point at which military strength, a defining characteristic of 'power' itself for the past five centuries, ceased to be that," he argues. "The Soviet Union collapsed, after all, with its military forces, even its nuclear capabilities, fully intact." Those are words worth keeping in mind as America, the surviving superpower, deals with the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. Without ideals, the missiles won't matter.

Reviewed by James Mann
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143038273
• ISBN-13: 978-0143038276
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #46,470 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Cold War in the Rearview Mirror, February 7, 2006

By	Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Cold War: A New History (Hardcover)

Yale history professor John Lewis Gaddis is America's foremost historian of the Cold War. Since the publication of "The United States and the Origins of the Cold War" in 1972, he has written a half dozen more books on the subject, each time finding a new perspective on the superpower standoff that took place between 1946 and 1991.

Prior to the 1970's, American historians, for the most part, put the blame of the origins of the Cold War on the Soviet system in general and on Josef Stalin in particular. Gaddis' early work was original insofar as it gave a more balanced perspective on the American/Soviet confrontation. After World War II, both superpowers acted rationally to protect their interests, having sacrificed many lives in hard-fought battles. Each side was protecting a way of life they thought morally superior.

In the current work under review, Gaddis' views seem to be evolving. Looking back at the Cold War in light of events since 1991, he concludes that it was primarily the power of ideas that won, since nuclear weapons had made military confrontation unthinkable. The liberal democracies and market economies of the West were better able to provide for their citizens than the command economies of the totalitarian system. The West offered their citizens hope while the Soviets instilled theirs with fear. Gaddis now believes it was the Soviets who were primarily responsible for starting the Cold War.

But why did the Cold War last so many years? Why didn't people rise up earlier? One reason, of course, was nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons prolonged the Cold War. The West had few options other than detente and containment. Gaddis has few kind words for the Nixon-Kissinger detente that left hundreds of thousands of disillusioned people behind the Iron Curtain without hope. He recounts in this book how certain key individuals facilitated change. Among these "saboteurs of the status quo" were Ronald Reagan, Margret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Lech Walesa. According to Gaddis, when Pope John Paul II went to Poland and kissed the ground, it marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Also, when Ronald Reagan sought to exploit the weaknesses of the Soviet Union by building an antimissle shield that he knew the Soviets couldn't match, he helped bring about the demise of the system. Also, adding to the slipstream of the demise was the unwitting assistance of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev was different from previous Soviet leaders - and the world is forever in his debt - in that he realized the arms race could not continue and that the Soviet Union could no longer maintain control over the populations of Eastern Europe.

Although Gaddis' work has been used by the Bush Administration as an endorsement of spreading democracy in the Middle East, it should be noted that the saboteurs of the status quo - and Bush sees himself as such - can only facilitate change. The real change, Gaddis argues, must come from the bottom up. Ronald Reagan did not end the Cold War - though he contributed greatly to its conclusion. The Hungarians, the Poles, and the East Germans ended the Cold War as they faced down the repressive Soviet system. This is all very illuminating with our present involvement in the Middle East.

This is an excellent, well-written and well-argued one-volume history of the Cold War, written by one of its most diligent historians. I highly recommend this book.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A collection of thematic insights rather than a comprehensive history, March 16, 2006

By	Odysseus "A Traveller" (Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cold War: A New History (Hardcover)

I bought this book with the expectation that it would provide a comprehensive overview of the events, episodes, personalities, motivations, and results of the Cold War. A reader looking for something similar might be disappointed. This book does not really attempt to be a comprehensive history of the Cold War, but is rather a collection of chapters, each devoted to a particular thematic aspect of the war. It reads as though Gaddis has a particular thesis about the Cold War that he wants to flesh out in each chapter, rather than telling the whole story in an orderly narrative.

As examples: there is a chapter about the "logic" of Mutual Assured Destruction, and how mankind's survival depended on two superpowers maneuvering their way through that system's pitfalls. There is another chapter contrasting the Leninist vision of authoritarianism with the Wilsonian vision of self-determination. There is a chapter about how the superpowers' respective allies eventually refused to do their bidding. There is a chapter about the moral paradoxes at the heart of American Cold War international policy. There is another about the key individual actors who forced the Cold War to a successful resolution. And there is one, sort of a "people power" chapter, about how the Cold War ended (Gaddis argues) largely because the internal contradictions of communism, the gap between its promises and its reality, would no longer be tolerated by its subjects.

I found many of these chapters to be thought-provoking, and often found them persuasive. At first, I resisted Gaddis's thesis about the spillover of amorality from the international sphere to the American domestic sphere, and how this precipitated the fall of Richard Nixon. It seemed a weak thesis to me at first, but upon reflection, I agree with Gaddis that there was a fundamental discomfort, a paradox, in how America waged the Cold War. We cozied up to various dictators who violated American values re individual rights, so long as they sided with us in the conflict. And we countenanced actions abroad that we would not have at home. Eventually, Gaddis argues, the roof fell in on those contradictions, when President Nixon started to practice the sort of statecraft domestically that had previously only been tolerated internationally. Gaddis seems to suggest that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, that this inconsistency was unsustainable.

In other places, though, I found Gaddis to be less convincing. Certainly the demonstrations of "people power" that brought down the communist regimes were courageous and consequential. But it is equally true that it could have come out quite differently, if a Stalin had still been in power. Gaddis argues that the people in the communist regimes had finally come to fully appreciate the vast gulf between communism's promises and its reality, and while that is no doubt true, many a similarly-cognizant subject of these regimes was crushed by them in earlier decades. Many other factors coalesced to bring down the governments behind the Iron Curtain, including the steady economic and military pressure brought to bear by a more prosperous west.

Perhaps the best chapter in the Gaddis book is the one that is devoted to "actors" -- the singular figures whose insights and vision succeeded in changing the world. Gaddis is clearly an admirer of John Paul II, and he also credits Ronald Reagan with a lofty vision beyond what most other statesmen of his time could see. Reagan, according to Gaddis, was critical to ending the uneasy, dangerous "peace" of Mutual Assured Destruction.

Another of Gaddis's finer chapters is one wherein he details the events in Hungary and East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gaddis presents more details and insights than I have found in other histories of those wondrous events of 1989.

Some of Gaddis's pronouncements struck me as simply curious. He states in one chapter that never so much misery and suffering has been borne from good intentions as under the communist regimes. Whose good intentions, I wondered? Stalin? Lenin? Marx? Mao? It really stretches the definition of "good intentions" to ascribe such to the architects of 20th century authoritarian communism. By this malleable definition, most any dictator could be said to have "good intentions."

Gaddis also provides a much loftier portrait of Woodrow Wilson than I believe most historians would share. Gaddis indicates that Wilson is highly respected today, but I would suggest that at least as many historians regard Wilson as an impractical romantic, in the arena of international relations.

I would recommend Gaddis's book as a second or third book on the Cold War, but not the first source. It is not the best source as to the "what," though Gaddis's pronouncements on "why" are often convincing.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Snapshot of History, March 16, 2006

By	Retired Reader (New Mexico) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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This review is from: The Cold War: A New History (Hardcover)

This book is a sweeping summary of what the author believes to be the principal events of the over forty year long confrontation between Communism and Capitalism called the Cold War. Gaddis is in every sense of the word an expert on the Cold War phenomenon and has used his expertise to write a concise, readable, and accurate summary of it. He correctly gives the late George F. Kennan credit for crafting the confrontation strategy of dynamic containment that in end allowed the Capitalist West to prevail over the Soviet Union and its client states. He also provides fascinating glimpses of how American Presidents from Truman to George H. W. Bush applied this strategy and how the Soviet leadership reacted to its application. Not all historians agree that Gaddis has interpreted many aspects of this period correctly, but most would acknowledge his knowledge of the period.
So is this the definitive book on the Cold War? The short answer is, no it is not. It is an excellent summary and introduction to the complex political, diplomatic, and military activity that produced, perpetuated, and ended the Cold War. It is an invitation to the reader to make a serious study of the Cold War era and discover in detail what a unique period it was in the history of the world.