It Could Have Been Hotter
Gaddis, John Lewis
BOOKS IN REVIEW seek greatness would not care what the world outside thought. On this point it's particularly instructive to note Booth's last words as he lay dying: Booth asked to see his hands...
...The conventional wisdom is that America's hostile response to forward Soviet moves dates from George Kennan's 8,000-word dispatch from Moscow of February 22, 1946 ("The Long Telegram"), which formulated the doctrine of containment...
...God knows what would have happened ifFDR had lived to serve all his fourth term...
...Tens of trillions of dollars in potential production were lost...
...A.J.R Taylor, whom I first met at that time, told me: "We may soon be fighting the bear...
...But Truman and the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, had settled their policy some weeks before...
...Like many, he thought the contest would soon be hot...
...This rapidly showed the world, in the shape of a two-system Germany, the difference between capitalism and Communism: in the west, freedom and prosperity...
...By the time he lifted it in May 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was already in existence, and Konrad Adenauer, another hero of the time, launched his brilliant bid to create the German miracle...
...On March 12, 1947, Truman accepted Britain's desperate request to take over her role as custodian of the freedom of Greece and Turkey...
...When the Cold War ended, I was in my sixties, and it was my eldest son, Daniel, then the Daily Telegraph's German correspondent, who asked the key question at the famous press conference, which brought the Berlin Wall crashing down that night...
...By mid-1949 it was already clear that the West would not lose the Cold War, and fairly evident it would win it in the end...
...What else could a self-absorbed, preening actor ask for...
...Three months later, Secretary Marshall formulated his aid plan to restore Europe's shattered economies, and it was Stalin's refusal to allow Communist Eastern Europe to benefit from Marshall aid that turned the division between East and West into an economic as well as a military fact...
...There is not going to be a thermonuclear war to end civilization...
...Russia shows no sign of recovering, economically or morally, though all the other victims are doing well...
...It Could Have Been Hotter T HE COLD WAR WAS A DISTINCT and lengthy phase in history...
...Kennedy let Khrushchev off the hook of his Cuban missile crisis, an aggressive blunder of Stalinist proportions...
...Things might have been very different...
...Millions there lived almost their entire lives in confinement and misery...
...In France the Communist leader Maurice Thorez, who had the best organized (and armed) party in the West, threw away a winning hand of cards...
...The Communist Czech coup in February 1948, marked by the mysterious death of Jan Masaryk, rammed the point home...
...As it was, the West got in Harry S. Truman, a pragmatic and decisive leader who was persuaded by Soviet action that it was unavoidably necessary to stop the rapid withdrawal of U.S...
...There were too many middle-of-the-road politicians in Western Europe, and indeed in America, who were scared of using the full resources of capitalism to expose the ever-widening gulf between the productive capacity of the two systems, whether in arms or consumer goods...
...One reason as sheer nervousness and cowardice, fear of "provoking" the Russians...
...All Roads Lead to...
...I toured the country in the spring of APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 BOOKS IN REVIEW 1948, just before the elections, which most people expected the CP to win...
...To cap matters, the Soviet system produced a clever fool in Gorbachev, who honestly believed that Communism could be reformed and proceeded to push it into freefall...
...Paul Johnson's maw books include Modern Times, Intellectuals, A History of the English People, and A History of the American People...
...But there are lessons to learn in an easier age, especially the old one: it always pays to tell the truth, and there is no substitute for courage...
...Alcide de Gasperi, one of the heroes of the early Cold War, won the election decisively, and his success persuaded Marshall Tito, across the Adriatic, to breakwith Stalin in June...
...An accomplished journalist and long-time contributor to this and other conservative publications, Shiflett writes in a breezy and personal style from a perspective that fairly represents the liberal Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity by Dave Shiflett (SENTINEL, 196 PAGES, $23.95) Reviewed by Rev...
...The fact that we are now worrying about Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, though these problems are serious enough, underlines the difference between the early 21st century and the horrors and perils of the 20th...
...Stalin believed that if the Allies had delayed opening the Second Front another year, he would have got his troops into Paris...
...The United States emerged from the testing decades remarkably well and ready to shoulder the new burden of being the world's only superpower...
...In Italy, Togliatti, who had an even bigger party, did the same...
...It also plays safe: I felt he was trying all the time to avoid offending the liberals while not treading on too many conservative conks...
...in the east, dictatorship and poverty...
...McCIoskey churches but clearly favors religions that don't consider "dogmatic" a dirty word...
...But equally, if Eisenhower had not vetoed Montgomery's plan for a deep, narrow-point thrust to Berlin, after the Nazi collapse in Normandy, the Red Army would never have got further than Poland...
...The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (PENGUIN PRESS, 352 PAGES, $27,95) Reviewed by Paul Johnson Those 44 years were packed with complex incidents, and Professor Gaddis's new book, though adequate as far as it goes, is too short (only 266 pages of text) to provide the detail needed...
...The years 1947-48 were decisive...
...If the actor-turned-assassin is watching this world from somewhere out there in perdition, however, he must take some small consolation that in the already planned film version of this book starring Harrison Ford, James Swanson is on record saying he believes Johnny Depp would make a great John Wilkes Booth...
...A short risk-free history of the Cold War is a contradiction in terms...
...McCIoskey is a priest of Opus Dei and research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute based in Washington, D.C...
...The British and Americans thought they would have to intervene to prevent an immediate coup...
...D ave Shiflett, described by Chuck Colson as "one of the most astute culture watchers and writers I know," has writtenExodus to explain the phenomenon summarized in the subtitle: "Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity...
...There was also a constant blurring of obvious distinctions between right and wrong (just as there is now in the war against terrorism...
...The drama has outlived him...
...troops from Europe, and to keep the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean...
...Churchill's description of the dividing line as "the Iron Curtain" crystallized everyone's fear in countries that could still choose: they all knew on which side of it they wanted to be...
...The ecological damage was colossal and largely irreversible...
...His website is FrMcCloskey.com...
...When it began in the closing months of 1945, I was a 16-year-old schoolboy looking forward to going up to Oxford...
...The Cold War was a tragedy for Eastern Europe...
...Stalin was making clumsy errors of judgment throughout 1946-49: his last one was to try to blockade Berlin, thus provoking the successful allied airlift, one of the great propaganda triumphs of the age...
...The ridiculous fuss over the Watergate "scandal" allowed Brezhnev, another bungler, to look powerful and secure in the '70s...
...The truth is they fitted in together perfectly and turned the 1980s into a decade of astonishing Western self-confidence...
...On this point it's particularly instructive to note Booth's last words as he lay dying: Booth asked to see his hands and whispered, "Useless, useless...
...When I got to Venice I was astonished to see British and American carriers anchored in the Basino, immediately beside the Piazzetta...
...I daresay historians will debate forever which of the three had the most impact...
...Words played a part as they always do in history...
...An extraordinary conjunction put Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan in the key positions at the same time, and together they had the courage and vision to do what the West could have done decades before-to push the Communist dominoes until they fell over...
...But they were not needed...
...How outsized must your sense of personal greatness be to strike down a President of the United States at the apex of his power and determine the impact and implications of such a dastardly deed were inconsequential...
...Then Russia's luck ran out...
...The Rev...
...DID IT TAKE SO LONG.9 Gaddis does n o t eally answer this question...
...The end of the Cold War confirms my belief that, while there is nothing inevitable in history, sheer luck, especially in the emergence of personalities, plays a key part...
...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006...
Vol. 39 • April 2006 • No. 3
