The United States and the Origins of the Cold War
Maddox, Robert James
Book Review The United States and the Origins of the Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis Columbia University $3.95 pb. Over the past five years there have appeared an inordinate number of books on the...
...All coalitions tend to come apart when the common danger is ended, and the war-born partnership between two such different societies was no exception...
...The source for this remark, Truman's Memoirs, permits no doubt that in context Byrnes was referring not to Russia, but to Japan...
...Unaccountably Gaddis repeats the myth concocted by revisionists that Secretary of State James F. Byrnes advised Truman in April 1945 that possession of the atomic bomb would enable the United States "to dictate its own terms at the end of the war" (p...
...251), as though Byrnes were referring to Russia...
...Gaddis' conclusion is that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union desired the Cold War, but both contributed to it out of fear, mutual suspicions, and misunderstanding, as well as genuinely conflicting goals...
...The difference is crucial...
...Most of these books, in fact, are little more than propaganda tracts gussied up with academic paraphernalia...
...The result was a kind of symmetrical elevation of hostilities: both sides interpreted specific acts by the other as threatening, and every retaliation heightened the tension that much more...
...Despite such slips, this book is very much worth reading...
...The frustrations of recent American foreign policies, most notably the war in Vietnam, have caused thoughtful Americans to call into question the context within which these policies have been formed...
...He tried, through personal diplomacy and material generosity (Lend Lease, for instance), to minimize the Russian dictator's suspicions of the West, in hopes of rendering this domination less onerous for the peoples involved...
...Harry S. Truman, in Origins, had to deal with Roosevelt's chickens when they came home to roost...
...Though the author treats the revisionists far more seriously than the facts warrant, his is probably the best single volume on the subject now available...
...Unfortunately for the sake of better understanding the past, however, a distressing proportion of the recent volumes are without scholarly merit...
...Roosevelt knew that Stalin meant to dominate Eastern Europe when the fighting ended, according to Gaddis, and thought there was very little the United States could do about it...
...There are some factual lapses as well...
...This is understandable...
...Gaddis argues convincingly that Truman at first tried to continue the Rooseveltian policy of accommodation with the Russians...
...This is particularly true of the influential New Left "revisionist" works, which purport to show that a militant, expansionist United States foisted the Cold War upon a Soviet Union whose sole concern was national security...
...John L. Gaddis' The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 is something else...
...But a combination of Stalin's heavy-handedness, Truman's own natural pugnacity, the increasing hostility of some of his key advisers, and congressional rumblings pushed him into ever more belligerent positions...
...Gaddis' book is stimulating and provocative throughout, however one may disagree with him...
...Gaddis is sharply critical of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy, which he holds responsible for misleading the American people as to Soviet intentions...
...Thus when Soviet intentions became clear at the war's end, both Congress and the American people reacted strongly to what they regarded as Russian duplicity...
...Over the past five years there have appeared an inordinate number of books on the origins of the Cold War...
...Stalin, on the other hand, saw in United States' policies toward Eastern Europe and defeated Germany some devious plot, the purpose of which was to undermine Soviet security...
...This reviewer parts company with the author on a number of issues: I think he underestimates the degree to which Roosevelt had moved to a "tougher" position by the time of his death, for instance, and his account of how American policymakers tried to coerce Russia economically seems to me unconvincing...
...His emphasis upon the importance of Congress is particularly significant, for many scholars have written as though the Truman Administration operated in a vacuum...
...This in turn caused Stalin - who understood Roosevelt to have implicitly sanctioned Soviet goals - to believe that the United States now sought to deprive Russia of the fruits of victory...
...The basic error on the part of the United States, in his view, is that Americans incorrectly interpreted Russian actions in Eastern Europe as but the prelude to world conquest...
...Robert James Maddox...
...In his zeal to win the war as quickly and efficiently as possible, however, FDR failed to prepare the public for such an eventuality and encouraged the notion that Stalin sought nothing that would conflict with American war aims...
Vol. 6 • May 1973 • No. 8
