COLD WAR REALITIES

...Whatever the future of the Cold War may be, it is time Americans understood how they were misled, manipulated, lied to, and swindled into supporting a bankrupt foreign policy framed by an elite establishment whose blunders have destroyed any claim it once might have had to leadership...

...He deserved great credit for withstanding pressures to retrieve that disaster by throwing in American forces, but the fact remains that he was willing to hazard a proxy invasion if he could get away with it...

...Not only by a hard line in foreign affairs but by loyalty pogroms and Red scares at home—particularly during the 1948 campaign, in which the Henry Wallace dissent was stifled by associating it with treason—President Truman sowed the crop that Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon reaped...

...To my satisfaction, at least, he destroys the myth, so assiduously elaborated by the subalterns of Camelot, that Kennedy's handling of the crisis was, in Arthur Schlesinger's words, a masterful "combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world...

...Yet, in fact, he did pledge no invasion in exchange for Khrushchev's retreat...

...But the public did not respond to this appeal and in the end the Marshall Plan could be passed through Congress only by reverting to the anti-Soviet line...

...how he rebuffed Khrushchev's repeated initiatives toward detente in the adolescent belief that he must prove his manhood by being tough...

...Lasch won a Pulitzer prize for his editorials on foreign policy during the years he edited the editorial page of the St...

...how he created the Berlin crisis of 1961 by consistently misinterpreting Khrushchev's purposes, and blew up a war scare which could have been averted by accepting, in the first place, the talks he came to in the end...

...Alfred A. Knopf...

...Both accepted and propagated Cold War dogmas now widely understood to have been false...

...There is a grain of truth in this, but how far it falls short of the whole truth is powerfully emphasized by these two excellent studies of the illiberal results of Democratic liberalism in foreign policy...

...Leadership must be measured not by its response to supposed imperatives of public opinion but by how it shapes and conditions those popular attitudes that are presumed to circumscribe its field of action...

...exports and force Europe's consent to the multilateral trading policies calculated to assure American economic supremacy in the postwar world...

...As Freeland brings out, the real reason for undertaking massive economic aid to Europe was to sustain the market for U.S...

...Mr...

...These two books are revisionist histories, and we need more of them...

...President Kennedy was compelled to risk a nuclear war over Cuba because the American people would not tolerate the basing of Russian missiles ninety miles from Florida...

...Both did their part to whip up the unruly passions of irrational anti-Communism...

...Walton shows how Kennedy insisted on a great arms buildup even though he discovered, after taking office, that the "missile gap" on which he had campaigned was a fiction...

...Both, in some degree, manufactured the crises during which one teetered on the nuclear brink and the other plunged the nation into a disastrous Korean war...

...He toyed with the idea of having the Cuban assassinated, tightened the squeeze on him at every opportunity, and so created the situation in which Castro could ask for protection from Russia and get it...

...commitment in Vietnam, switched its basis from advice and aid to direct combat involvement, and set in motion the forces (as well as the advisers) that led inexorably to Johnson's fateful escalation...

...Both the Cubans and the Russians insisted, before the crisis reached the acute stage, that guarantees against a U.S.-backed invasion would make Soviet defense of the island unnecessary...

...the truman doctrine and the origins of mccarthyism, by Richard M. Freeland...

...In the Cold War climate, anything as sensible as that was considered a sign of weakness...

...Even more, while his intimates were tearing Adlai Stevenson to tatters for daring to suggest a trade of the Cuba missiles for withdrawal of the exactly analogous American Jupiters from Italy and Turkey, Kennedy had his brother Robert privately promise the Soviets just such a trade...

...In The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthy-ism, historian Richard Freeland explores the origins of that policy and demonstrates how President Truman, declaring a global ideological war in order to sell his countrymen a relatively minor aid program for Greece and Turkey, created the climate of mindless anti-Communism which dominated Washington for years thereafter...

...Nowhere does Walton challenge the conventional wisdom more devastat-ingly than in his analysis of the Cuba missile crisis of 1962...

...It may be true that, politically, Kennedy had to get the Soviet missiles out of Cuba, but it is not necessarily true that he had to go to the brink of a nuclear showdown to do so...

...We can all thank Kennedy, as well as Khrushchev, for drawing back from the brink once he got there, but his "will, nerve, and wisdom" would have been more admirable if applied to avoiding nuclear confrontation to begin with...

...Himself a minor functionary in the Administration, as United Nations correspondent for the Voice of America, he is merciless in stripping the Kennedy record of the myths cultivated by admirers...

...419 pp...

...how in reflex obedience to an unfounded domino theory and the unexamined assumptions of containment he deepened the U.S...

...Kennedy and his advisers, like the American public, had been conditioned by more than a decade of Cold War propaganda and policy going back to the Truman Doctrine...

...President Truman had no alternative to war in Korea because the political atmosphere of rampant McCarthyism made any accommodation with Communists impossible...

...President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson found it impossible to resist the logic of the Asia hardliners, who kept pointing out that if the Truman Doctrine was good for Greece it must be good for China...

...reviewed by Robert Lasch Throughout the Cold War, American policy during a succession of crises has been ordained, so say its apologists, by political "realities" at home...

...He had an obsession with Castro...

...It is a safe presumption that his humiliation of Khrushchev led to the latter's downfall and the Soviet military buildup of the Sixties which even now has the Pentagon clamoring for yet another round of the arms race...

...And so on...

...Having set out in 1949 to abandon Chiang Kai-shek, accept the reality of Communist China, and avoid any defense commitment to Formosa or Korea, the Truman Administration, buffeted by the storms of McCarthyism in the spring of 1950, back-tracked on every point...

...Had Kennedy accepted Castro as the Cubans' own affair and worked to normalize relations, the crisis might never have arisen...

...Louis Post-Dispatch...

...By summer it was fighting an Asian land war in Korea for territory which the Joint Chiefs of Staff had repeatedly judged not worth fighting for, and by the following winter it was locked in a bloody war with China that was to pollute the Far Eastern atmosphere for twenty years...

...Richard Walton's provocative book, Cold War and Counter-Revolution, will strike anguish into the hearts of those Americans who cherish the legends above the facts of the Kennedy Administration...

...What this kind of admiration overlooks is that President Kennedy made the missile crisis possible by ordering the Bay of Pigs invasion eighteen months earlier...

...In this light both Presidents Truman and Kennedy come off badly...