Armed Truce

...Thomas undertakes to show how a few local Communists cooperated because they were not real Rumanians: Gheorghiu-Dej and Vasile Luca and Ana Pauker...

...he was trying to cooperate so as to hold a modicum of control...

...Truman and his partner Eddie Jacobson ran the haberdashery from 1919 to 1922, and they did not extend credit...

...For the task Stalin sent Andrei Vyshinsky, nothing less than a gangster, the unspeakable prosecutor of the purge trials...

...I have never thought much about being rootless, even though I cannot trace my family on either side beyond my great-grandfathers...

...Well, Hugh Thomas does not understand American roots, which are important only to members of the DAR...

...He lays out the details of the Cold War, and if a reader doesn't want to take his hand and follow him through the woods, that's up to the reader...

...Theirs has been a tragic history, and actually has continued to be tragic down to the present, when the Communist regime is so incompetent that it has reduced the Rumanian economy to the level of Albania...

...Eastern Europe, he goes into detail about Czechoslovakia, or about Hungary, or Rumania, without patience for readers to whom place names and people are not exactly common knowledge...

...The author remarks in the blurb that one of his grandfathers came from Wales, the other from "an old Staffordshire family...

...The figure, maybe inconsequential, but then Thomas ought to get it straight, is eleven—from 1906 to 1917...

...Here the responsibility must be shared by Thomas and his New York publisher, Antheneum, which apparently has no editors...

...the Soviet archives, of course, are closed tight and presumably, will continue to be...

...Truman's portrait must be gotten correctly, for otherwise the historian does not know his man...

...T hen, lastly, this interesting and yet (in, the instance of Truman) casually inaccurate volume needs, it would seem, more care, more subtlety in judging the very complicated problems in Eastern Europe during the immediate postwar months, the beginning of the Cold War...

...But the author does not have a feel for the extraordinarily difficult situation of a little country such as Rumania, caught between East and West...

...In the 1920s," Thomas writes, "he had tried to make money as a haberdasher, but he had been too generous to his creditors...

...Take my roots...

...King Carol, who never wanted to be king, was called back after a ten-year exile...

...Where did he get that...

...Along the way he slipped in books about Suez, John Strachey, the radical challenge in Europe, and Goya...

...Their origins had little to do with their cooperation...

...The temptation, however, is to draw Truman simply, to think that this straightforward character does not deserve the care that, say, Roosevelt requires...

...Because, apparently, they are not such roots as Thomas himself has...

...And—sorry to be so longwinded in relating what Hugh Thomas ought to do—there needs to be excessive caution in getting the factual record straight...

...They were caught in the sudden price deflation of 1921-1922 and lost $25,000 on a $35,000 inventory, an enormous loss in those days...

...But now, after a long generation and more, the materials on the beginnings of the Cold War are open (at least in the West...

...And why does he say that...

...The basic materials, such as the U.S...

...ARMED TRUCE: THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR, 1945-46 Hugh Thomas/Atheneum/$27.50 Robert H. Ferrell 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 They actually could have examined the excesses of the Nixon period, where there was plenty of room for revision...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 45...

...Truman admittedly was a well-ordered, systematic character, and when he enters the pages of history he offers the historian a chance to relax, to breathe a sigh of relief—compared to analyzing the activities of the devious, inferential Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Indeed the riffling is absolutely necessary, for otherwise Thomas or any other writer confronting this forbidding terrain, Alps upon Alps, will never get to the top, never finish...

...Let it be said also that Thomas's timing of his new book on the Cold War is perfect...

...Pauker that when she put up her umbrella in Bucharest it was a sign that it was raining in Moscow...

...All the while he has been carrying on—according to the blurb, which Thomas surely wrote or approved: he retains his interest in Spain and the Mediterranean, is married to a painter named Vanessa, has three children, and lives in London...

...by purges of teachers, by imposing new Marxist-Leninist textbooks and organising pro-Communist rallies of children...

...He believed that both of his great-grandfathers came from Kentucky but any further provenance never disturbed him...

...The revisionists of fifteen or twenty years ago were too soon with their books, as well as too wrongheaded...

...He says that Truman's parents "moved annually from farm to farm...

...Generally the accounting is correct in a factual sense...

...Let me offer an example of what Thomas did with President Harry S. Truman, who is the most important actor in his book about the Cold War...

...Grandview is the name of the Missouri town near which Truman's maternal grandfather owned a big farm of 600 acres...

...What you sawwas what you got...

...281-289...

...But this huge book is nonetheless flawed, and the flaws need discussion, not merely because they will forewarn readers but because, perhaps, their setting out may cause this hardworking, able, indeed indefatigable author to rethink what he is doing...

...He began with the Spanish Civil War, turned to a history of Cuba, thence to a History of the World "in order to have an opportunity to broaden his interests" (says the book jacket...

...The rightist Tataresou failed, and so did the leftist Stefan Voitec, who as minister of education sought to give evidence of cooperating with the Communists by "bolshevising the schools...

...Pauker was the daughter of a rabbi in Moldavia...

...no writer today needs to write under the shadow of that disaster...

...The photograph of him shows a workmanlike fellow, dressed casually, sitting in what appears to be a woods, looking earnestly at the camera, and holding (what else...

...The Rumanians are not really a people capable only of inspiring jokes—no more than the Poles or the East Frisians...

...But Thomas or anyone seeking to write the history of the Cold, War must take notes with care, and not seize upon whatever is easily at hand, or find himself with the temptation to write from memory or make up what ought to fit and in a literary way does fit...

...The temptation for an industrious author like Thomas is to roll through the mountainous Nachlass, the piles of documents and books and articles, and take out what seems important and riffle the rest...

...Gheorghiu-Dej and Luca had been born in Transylvania when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Mrs...

...Thomas writes in enormous paragraphs, moving around ruminatively with several buts or howevers or neverthelesses...

...Upon picking up this book I noticed that the jacket blurb retailed its virtues, and one of them caught my eye: "Hugh Thomas's book contains vivid portraits of the main actors on this shaky stage: . . . Truman . . ." I checked the index and turned to p. 117...

...It is a pity that text and notes contain so many typos and misspellings and other lapses, such as describing Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson as "secretary for war...

...The author divides his new book into five "books," each with chapters —the first on Russia, second on the West, then a look at the lands in dispute East and West, followed by the atomic bomb, concluding with the signs of division in 1946, namely, Churchill's Fulton speech about the Iron Curtain and the Soviets' reluctant departure from Azerbaijan in Iran...

...They were weaklings, inconsequential people, "yes" men and women who did what Vyshinsky told them...

...He goes into the repressions in Eastern Europe, relates how democrats in those countries occupied by the Red Army were in deep trouble from the outset, and how heroism and cowardice alike had the same reward, poverty at home and complete subjection to the local Communists directed from Moscow, or else a journey on the dreadful trains that went east to Siberia...

...It is the eighth book Thomas has published in the past quarter century...

...To prepare for his ordeal he shucked off his university (unnamed) and "accepted an honorary post as chairman for the Centre for Policy Studies, a new think-tank designed to assist in the long-overdue regeneration of Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher...

...Indeed one of my roots strikes me as funny—family lore has it that one great-grandfather came out of England in the 1850s, in a hurry, because of "woman trouble...

...German power was overwhelming...

...We do not need to know the massively and often unimportantly documented movements of what is now forty-two years into the past...

...He writes that "they had always owned 'Grandview,' a big house without much land...

...He has written in great detail, setting out the movements of diplomatic notes or the exchanges by leaders at conferences...

...In the chapters, say, on Robert H. Ferrell is professor of history at Indiana University and author of numerous books, including Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917-1921 and Truman: A Centenary Remembrance...

...Beyond the roots problem Thomas gets into other trouble...

...At the end of the war the country was in dreadful shape, and it was' the Russians' turn to take it over...

...Actually they didthis only between the years 1884 and 1887...

...At this point Thomas's common sense, buttressed by his conservative politics, avoids the errors of the revisionist historians of the late 1960s and early 1970s...

...Then, also, the revisionists were so mesmerized by America's failure in Vietnam that they wrote it backward into their accounts of the Truman era...

...State Department archives and the British archives, were only beginning to open, and collections of manuscript material were closed—Dean Acheson's papers at Yale opened only two years ago...

...He tried his best to maintain the country's independence against predators on both sides, but by 1939 had to give in...

...The fact that Voitec had a Communist deputy did not necessarily mean that the minister of education himself was weak...

...That is a plausible conclusion but incorrect...

...It was said of Mrs...

...A postscript in regard to the book...

...As for Truman's roots, they reached back far enough...

...first of all, what we do not need is an enormously detailed history of the Cold War, an accounting such as Thomas is proposing, that will run to several big volumes and virtually exhaust its readers—as, frankly, Churchill did in his books (how many readers of the present review have ever gotten beyond Churchill's first volume...

...Yes, the analyzer of this period, of the Cold War, needs himself to know those movements...

...Consider the case of Rumania, as set out in pp...

...Thomas says Truman farmed before the First World War for nine years...

...But he must generalize from them, not recite them...

...Curiously the book was set in Scranton by Hadden Craftsmen, usually an excellent printer...

...instead, of course, Tataresou's reward was execution...

...Thomas here relates that Truman seemed to have no roots...

...He describes the foreign minister, Gheorghe Tataresou, as an opportunist, when Tataresou was simply an honest bourgeois who was trying to save something from the wreck...

...By the year 1930, Rumania already was in trouble, what with the Great Depression and a political confusion too complicated to relate...

...All the while, so he shows, the presence of Russian troops in Eastern Europe, the troops of the United States and Britain in the West, divided the Continent into what during the past decades has become a permanent arrangement...

...They looked farther back, to a time when things were quite different...

...Some perspective is possible also on Vietnam...

...Let it be said that this is no revisionist nonsense, about how the West held victory in its hands in 1945 and then lost the peace because leaders lacked resolution or were dreaming of the markets of Eastern Europe or failed to appreciate Russian sensibilities and therefore forced the Soviet Union into a war that Walter Lippmann announced was .a cold war because it was not openly declared and waged...

...So much the worse for them, he seems to say, as he footslogs through what, he evidently believes, are essential materials...

...He promises several books on the Cold War, perhaps something like the six volumes that Churchill did on World War II...

...This is a historical error...

...At this juncture, however, Thomas fails to understand the situation...