The Devil We Knew
Brands, H.W.
THE DEVIL WE KNEW: AMERICANS AND THE COLD WAR H.W. Brands Oxford University Press /243 pages / $25 reviewed by ARCH PUDDINGTON H W. Brands is part of a new generation of revisionist historians...
...For evidence, he devotes eight pages to J. Edgar Hoover's vendetta against Martin Luther King, and reaches the conclusion that "Cold War patriotism" may well have stalled the achievement of the civil rights movement's goals...
...To Brands, this kind of thinking fed the flames of American chauvinism, paranoia, and missionary zealotry...
...Nor does Brands come to grips with the degree to which the Soviet system contributed to the perpetuation of the Cold War...
...On the other hand, he should be expected to deal honestly with the Communist system and its policies, insofar as they influenced America's own, and onthis score, Brands fails miserably...
...He also felt that Communists were "consistently totalitarian in every 72 The American Spectator March 1994 political and historical environment...
...Where Mills and others championed anti-imperialist struggle, at least in the Third World, Brands, having witnessed Arch Puddington worked until recently for Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty...
...He incorrectly asserts that American foreign broadcasts were a significant factor in the Hungarian Revolution...
...Ultimately, however, the similarities between the old revisionism and the new are more striking than the differences...
...In the end, America's belief in its moral superiority led it to embrace the tactics of its totalitarian rival...
...He sneers at American hard-liners for exaggerating Soviet military power and failing to grasp basic weaknesses in Soviet society...
...Brands accepts the, traditional view of the Cold War as a time of repression, conformity, and jingoism that eroded our civil liberties and distorted our values—and not just during the McCarthy era...
...We suffer, he says without originality, from "an incurable desire to make the world a better place...
...In the 1960s, the older generation—C...
...Niebuhr believed that, where the Nazis relied on raw power, Communists used lies and deceptions to pose as "the liberators of every class or nation which they intend to enslave...
...But it is much more likely that a concern that segregation hurt America's image in the Third World intensified the establishment's support for civil rights legislation...
...One can hardly imagine a worse example...
...Like earlier revisionists, Brands condemns Cold War liberals and neoconservatives, and not Joseph McCarthy, as principally responsible for leading America towards a ruinous anti-Sovietism...
...Brands Oxford University Press /243 pages / $25 reviewed by ARCH PUDDINGTON H W. Brands is part of a new generation of revisionist historians • of the Cold War...
...Wright Mills, William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz, Marcus Raskin, et al.—thundered against American imperialism and gloried in the coming age of Third World revolution...
...alongwith Eisenhower, for his warnings against the military-industrial complex...
...We may never know...
...He also misreads perestroika...
...Communism retained an appeal, at least for the Maurice Bishops and Daniel Ortegas of the world, well after the truth was known about the character of the system in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...
...Gorbachev's initiatives proved not that Communism could be reformed, but precisely the opposite...
...and Brands doesn't care enough to speculate...
...And despite claims that this or that revolutionary government was creating a new and non-authoritarian model, in practice all Communist societies developed along patterns set down in Moscow or Prague, whether the country in question was Nicaragua, Grenada, or North Korea...
...Brands accuses Americans of having "loved the Cold War too much to let it go...
...While Brands, a professor at Texas A&M, agrees with a great deal of earlier revisionist dogma, he enjoys one distinct advantage: he has seen the, future, and it has failed...
...This book is about America's Cold War experience, and the author is not restricted by an equal time rule...
...His enemies' list features Senator Henry Jackson, Truman's foreign policy team, and—especially—those who gave the Cold War intellectual respectability, from Reinhold Niebuhr to Norman Podhoretz...
...He does not insist that Communism might have succeeded if only the United States had not forced it to repressive extremes...
...He approves of Henry Wallace's understanding attitude towards the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, and of the Jimmy Carter who spoke of America having overcome its "inordinate fear of Communism...
...Brands admires Senator Robert Taft, for his anti-interventionism...
...171 The American Spectator March 1994 73...
...Yet, in retrospect, Niebuhr's warnings seem remarkably prescient...
...He thus derides Reinhold Niebuhr as an ideological accomplice of McCarthyism for having described Communism as more dangerous than Hitlerism...
...They were notable for a shrill anti-Americanism, an enthusiasm for Mandan "experiments" of the Cuban variety, and a relentless search for grand, sweeping theories to explain all of postwar American policy...
...Brands is a scholar in a free society, and therefore has access to just about every policy document and public utterance issued during the past four decades...
...American politicianshave always believed that "America had important lessons to teach their fellow human beings," and our "save-the-world inclination" was responsible for the "fervor with which Americans waged the Cold War...
...But were there Soviet generals who talked about bombing America back to the Stone Age...
...More fundamentally, Brands is so relaxed towards the nature of Communism that he views anything but easygoing coexistence as folly...
...B rands consistently misinterprets or slants Communist history to serve the idea that American hawkishness reinforced Kremlin hard-line attitudes...
...the consequences of Communist governance in Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, is spared the obligation of defending the socialist faith...
...He writes frequently on the history of the Cold War...
...But they have not been heard demanding any apologies...
...Indeed, the argument for détente rested on the image of a heavily armed, deeply suspicious, and internally repressive military state whose aspirations to superpower respect had to be acknowledged precisely because, it was asserted, a thwarted or cornered USSR might pose a real danger to world peace...
...Never once does Brands confront the fact that the Cold War witnessed broadened individual liberties, a revolution in racial and sexual relations, and an explosion in artistic individualism...
...Brands writes of anti-Communism with a mocking superciliousness, poking fun at the benighted hard-liners who actually believed in such concepts as the Free World and democratic capitalism...
...Yet these perceptions differed hardly at all from the way the detentists and doves saw things...
...They are not naive about America's failure to consistently fulfill its historic ideals...
...And where earlier revisionists hated the Cold War for what it allegedly did to those foreign lands whose aspirations to revolution were rebuffed, Brands blames it for a moral decline in America itself...
...Did the Soviets seriously consider an invasion of Europe...
...Where others placed responsibility on political, business, or military elites, Brands wags a finger at the American people in general...
...He ignores convincing evidence that Fidel Castro was pro-Communist well before he took power, and was thus not pushed into Moscow's arms by hostility from Washington...
...1 f there is a basic difference between Brands and other revisionist writers, it lies in the question of which Americans were primarily to blame for the continuation of the Cold War over the span of forty-five years...
...As Brands reminds us, again and again, many silly things were said during the Cold War by American politicians, military men, and members of the political fringes...
...And he wastes little time on shopworn notions that the Cold War was triggered by President Truman's "atomic diplomacy," or that prospects for détente were repeatedly scuttled by a rogue CIA...
...Hoover's campaignagainst King and other civil rights luminaries was certainly disgraceful...
...Interestingly, Brands has neglected the opinion of those most qualified to issue a verdict: the people who actually experienced life under Communism...
Vol. 27 • March 1994 • No. 3
