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Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists

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A scholar of the Truman administration, Ferrell has compiled six reworked essays that mainly concern the origins of the Cold War. The first three in particular lay waste to the arguments of leftist historians who blame the United States for the Cold War. More specifically, he exposes the inadequacies of their research and the way in which their political agendas pre-determined the outcomes and conclusions of their books. Ferrell points out that the revisionists constructed their arguments before State Department records had become available. He essentially asks, "If the United States was bent on using nuclear weapons to intimidate the Soviets after WWII, why did it do such a slipshod job of producing them?" Ferrell shows how puny the US military became between 1946-50, something which Truman would not have allowed if he had been pursuing confrontation with the USSR.
The only way Ferrell could have produced a better book would have been to synthesize his essays into more of a single entity that examined the origins of the Cold War.
His is a fine addition to the growing list of scholarship that is thoroughly refuting and disproving the evidence and the arguments of the Cold War revisionists.

Robert Ferrell, who for many years was a or the leading diplomatic historian of the U.S. has had second and third careers as a biographer of non Mt. Rushmore Presidents, such as Coolidge and Harding, and characteristics of presidential history such as presidential health, and finally as a Truman biographer. His many books on aspects of Truman's life (on the farm, with the Pendegast machine, getting the VP nomination)are nicely complemented by this book which simply and directly takes apart the revisionist claims re: dropping the bomb, starting the cold war, and other subjects.