We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (A Council on Foreign Relations book) |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Kansas History > Item 28
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We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (A Council on Foreign Relations book)
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by John Lewis Gaddis
Sales Rank: 111552
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List Price: $24.95
$22.45
At Amazon
on 10-30-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 448 pages
Published by: Oxford University Press, USA July 9, 1998
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0198780710
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0198780717
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
Product Review
Was the Cold War inevitable? Was there an international communist conspiracy? Did Castro and Khrushchev beat Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis? After combing through a mass of declassified and previously unavailable documentation to reconsider the collision of the American and Soviet empires, Yale professor Gaddis replies in the affirmative. Given Josef Stalin's convictions, the Cold War was inescapable: it is the choices that each side made that prove fruitful for historical research, and not the mere fact of the war, as Gaddis neatly demonstrates. The American empire--Gaddis's term--prevailed because, he says, "democracy proved superior to autocracy in maintaining coalitions," and not necessarily because of any technological or economic advantage. Gaddis dispels several misconceptions and urges that students of Cold War history should foremost "retain the capacity to be surprised."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
"We" refers to "historians" of the cold war, and Gaddis has been one of the most notable. In this work, he synthesizes the recent scholarship growing out of the partial opening of Soviet archives relating to the cold war, up through the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Gaddis' nuanced summary clarifies the hitherto knottiest problems of interpretation: divining Stalin's motives in communizing Eastern Europe; his role in starting the Korean War; and Khrushchev's bombastic gyrations of policy. To explain the origin of it all, Gaddis resurrects two indispensable factors: Stalin's suspicious, tyrannical personality and the Leninist ideology. Whatever the Americans did to make the cold war happen, Gaddis argues that the Soviet dictator's aims (and mistakes in pursuing them) virtually guaranteed a face-off. Nuclear weapons just ensured that the rigidity would endure until the fundamental of Stalinist rule, coercion, was repudiated. A magisterial overview that clarifies all issues of the cold war's origins. Gilbert Taylor
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
This is an analysis of the Cold War, not a history. Gaddis' writing style is a bit dry, but this is more than offset by the wealth of insight and information contained in his book. He has four principal themes: · If you can pin the blame for starting the Cold War on anyone, it would be Josef Stalin. His personality and leadership style caused it. His imprint was so strong on the Soviet Union that Moscow's leadership style in the three decades following his death was still steeped in his. This served to perpetuate the Cold War, which began on his watch. (I presume, another reason it continued was that it had become institutionalized in the West as well by the mid-50s). It wasn't until the next generation of leaders-Gorbachev-came along that they finally broke from the Stalinist tradition. He sees no coincidence between this and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. · The Cold War was less bi-polar than is generally thought. Not only did Yugoslavia set its own course from Moscow, but Red China often expressed a will of its own even in the early days. (I was surprised to learn that Mao Zedong was a fan of Stalin's and remained so after Stalin's death.) Also, Eastern Europe remained in the Soviet Union's sphere only by force and coercion. North Vietnam, North Korea, and even East Germany, didn't always tow the line. · The turning point of the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Up to that point, politics, ideology, and economics all played into the conflict, and the issue, even viewed from today, was considered to be in doubt. After the Cuban Missile Crisis the focus was solely on military power, which obscured to both sides the reality that the Soviet Union was losing-that it couldn't keep up either morally or economically. · Digging into old Soviet and East European files and sources will bring surprises. He thinks (and, it would appear, reasonably so) that there's much more to be learned as we penetrate the old files. Gaddis has a lot of detail on the Cuban Missile Crisis, especially on the number and types of Soviet missiles and associated equipment that deployed to Cuba, the number of Soviet troops involved, and the communications flow up and down the Soviet chain of command between Cuba and Moscow. I was struck by the apparent willingness of Castro to let the situation go nuclear. This is a readable book that just begins to scratch the surface of the heretofore hidden history of the Cold War. Hopefully it is just a hint at what is to come. For that matter, Mao seems to have never shrunk from the prospect of a full nuclear exchange either. This frightened Moscow, but in each case seems to have resulted from Castro's and Mao's believing Nikita Khrushchev's bombastic propaganda about the Soviet Union having nuclear parity with, and even superiority over, the West.
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We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (A Council on Foreign Relations book)
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Price: $22.45
Updated on 10-30-2008.
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