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| The Cold War: A New History | 
 enlarge | Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  64 reviews
Sales Rank: 19539
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0143038273
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.825
EAN: 9780143038276
ASIN: 0143038273
Publication Date: December 26, 2006
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| Customer Reviews:
 Flawed, but still useful history of the Cold War January 23, 2006
12 out of 48 found this review helpful
If only Professor Gaddis had been able to completely clear his mind of leftist biases, this would have been a true classic. Unfortunately, Gaddis was unable to bring true objectivity to his otherwise excellent concise history of the Cold War.
Gaddis repeats the false claim that Mao achieved his takeover of China without significant assistance from the Soviet Union. This is not true. The Soviet Union financed the Chinese Communist Party from its inception. Stalin's minions through the years trained many of the CCP cadres in the Soviet Union. When the Japanese surrendered, the Soviets turned over many tons of armaments to the CCP. This bit of dishonesty of Prof. Gaddis' part is not small.
With regard to Reagan, Gaddis is honest enough to give partial credit to President Reagan for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he minimizes his part, preferring to credit Pope John Paul for providing the main impetus. Likewise Gaddis takes up the leftist cant that the Soviet Union was ready to expire as if it were a pile of sand that needed only a few grains more on top to make it topple. This petulant refusal to grant credit where credit is due detracts from an otherwise fine historical study.
Gaddis shows himself to be as much a slave to the left as was any of Stalin's minions. He blatantly states that "once the liberation of [Kuwait] began early in 1991, Saddam Hussein found his military deployments so visible, and therefore so exposed to attack, that he had no choice but to withdraw." This is one of the leftwing rationales intended to deny credit to George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher and the other leaders who were brave enough to confront those who supported the tyrant Hussein. Hussein kept his troops in place until they were practically surrounded at which point the troops panicked and tried to run. This kind of distortion should have been beneath Gaddis; alas, it was not.
Finally, without exhausting the list, Gaddis waves his politically correct credentials when referring to a comment by Karl Marx. Gaddis is at pains to refer to Marx's use of the "sexist terminology of 1852" when he said that "[m]en make their own history." Of what relevance to anything except doctrinaire left-wing political correctness is Gaddis' comment?
There are numerous other tinged comments in Gaddis' work. It is a pity they exist, because The Cold War could have been a truly excellent history. As it is, it does provide a concise history of how the Cold War came to be, how the struggle was fought and ultimately, if inaccurately, how the Soviet Union and some of its satellites threw off Communism. But The Cold War must be read with wariness because of its author's tendency to subtly shade the truth.
Jerry
A collection of thematic insights rather than a comprehensive history March 17, 2006
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
I bought this book with the expectation that it would provide a comprehensive overview of the events, episodes, personalities, motivations, and results of the Cold War. A reader looking for something similar might be disappointed. This book does not really attempt to be a comprehensive history of the Cold War, but is rather a collection of chapters, each devoted to a particular thematic aspect of the war. It reads as though Gaddis has a particular thesis about the Cold War that he wants to flesh out in each chapter, rather than telling the whole story in an orderly narrative.
As examples: there is a chapter about the "logic" of Mutual Assured Destruction, and how mankind's survival depended on two superpowers maneuvering their way through that system's pitfalls. There is another chapter contrasting the Leninist vision of authoritarianism with the Wilsonian vision of self-determination. There is a chapter about how the superpowers' respective allies eventually refused to do their bidding. There is a chapter about the moral paradoxes at the heart of American Cold War international policy. There is another about the key individual actors who forced the Cold War to a successful resolution. And there is one, sort of a "people power" chapter, about how the Cold War ended (Gaddis argues) largely because the internal contradictions of communism, the gap between its promises and its reality, would no longer be tolerated by its subjects.
I found many of these chapters to be thought-provoking, and often found them persuasive. At first, I resisted Gaddis's thesis about the spillover of amorality from the international sphere to the American domestic sphere, and how this precipitated the fall of Richard Nixon. It seemed a weak thesis to me at first, but upon reflection, I agree with Gaddis that there was a fundamental discomfort, a paradox, in how America waged the Cold War. We cozied up to various dictators who violated American values re individual rights, so long as they sided with us in the conflict. And we countenanced actions abroad that we would not have at home. Eventually, Gaddis argues, the roof fell in on those contradictions, when President Nixon started to practice the sort of statecraft domestically that had previously only been tolerated internationally. Gaddis seems to suggest that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, that this inconsistency was unsustainable.
In other places, though, I found Gaddis to be less convincing. Certainly the demonstrations of "people power" that brought down the communist regimes were courageous and consequential. But it is equally true that it could have come out quite differently, if a Stalin had still been in power. Gaddis argues that the people in the communist regimes had finally come to fully appreciate the vast gulf between communism's promises and its reality, and while that is no doubt true, many a similarly-cognizant subject of these regimes was crushed by them in earlier decades. Many other factors coalesced to bring down the governments behind the Iron Curtain, including the steady economic and military pressure brought to bear by a more prosperous west.
Perhaps the best chapter in the Gaddis book is the one that is devoted to "actors" -- the singular figures whose insights and vision succeeded in changing the world. Gaddis is clearly an admirer of John Paul II, and he also credits Ronald Reagan with a lofty vision beyond what most other statesmen of his time could see. Reagan, according to Gaddis, was critical to ending the uneasy, dangerous "peace" of Mutual Assured Destruction.
Another of Gaddis's finer chapters is one wherein he details the events in Hungary and East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gaddis presents more details and insights than I have found in other histories of those wondrous events of 1989.
Some of Gaddis's pronouncements struck me as simply curious. He states in one chapter that never so much misery and suffering has been borne from good intentions as under the communist regimes. Whose good intentions, I wondered? Stalin? Lenin? Marx? Mao? It really stretches the definition of "good intentions" to ascribe such to the architects of 20th century authoritarian communism. By this malleable definition, most any dictator could be said to have "good intentions."
Gaddis also provides a much loftier portrait of Woodrow Wilson than I believe most historians would share. Gaddis indicates that Wilson is highly respected today, but I would suggest that at least as many historians regard Wilson as an impractical romantic, in the arena of international relations.
I would recommend Gaddis's book as a second or third book on the Cold War, but not the first source. It is not the best source as to the "what," though Gaddis's pronouncements on "why" are often convincing.
Ich Bin Ein Beginner January 18, 2006
11 out of 22 found this review helpful
I picked up this book because I wanted to have a greater understanding of the events of the Cold War. I grew up in the eighties, so most of my memories are confined to the Reagan-Gorbachev era. I knew of the Berlin Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis, Korean War, etc., but I didn't have a clear idea of the details surrounding these important events.
Unfortunately, while Gaddis' book is an easy read and provides fascinating analysis, he seems to assume that the reader is already familiar with the events of the Cold War. For example, the Cuban Missile Crisis is covered in about five pages, and while the events are alluded to, I still have no idea exactly what happened, or when it happened, how people reacted at the time, etc. The author mentions the event, and proceeds directly to the analysis.
I have not finished the book yet, and will probably not pick it up again until I read a more factually in-depth work on the Cold War. This is disappointing because the author states in the introduction that he wrote this book as a self-contained work on the Cold War, intended for beginners. In that respect, I think he has failed.
 Snapshot of History March 16, 2006
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
This book is a sweeping summary of what the author believes to be the principal events of the over forty year long confrontation between Communism and Capitalism called the Cold War. Gaddis is in every sense of the word an expert on the Cold War phenomenon and has used his expertise to write a concise, readable, and accurate summary of it. He correctly gives the late George F. Kennan credit for crafting the confrontation strategy of dynamic containment that in end allowed the Capitalist West to prevail over the Soviet Union and its client states. He also provides fascinating glimpses of how American Presidents from Truman to George H. W. Bush applied this strategy and how the Soviet leadership reacted to its application. Not all historians agree that Gaddis has interpreted many aspects of this period correctly, but most would acknowledge his knowledge of the period.
So is this the definitive book on the Cold War? The short answer is, no it is not. It is an excellent summary and introduction to the complex political, diplomatic, and military activity that produced, perpetuated, and ended the Cold War. It is an invitation to the reader to make a serious study of the Cold War era and discover in detail what a unique period it was in the history of the world.
Gaddis Misses the Deepest Meaning April 12, 2006
10 out of 35 found this review helpful
Though Gaddis perceives the corruption of the Soviet system due to Stalin, he misses the second, even-deeper cause of the failure of the Soviet System and the rise of the Cold War: how the West tried to systematically destroy the Russian revolution in its early days, leading to its eventual self-corruption. For its encroachment, Nature returned with a fury and set Russia -- which had in its earliest days, positive revolutionary new social values, (that ironically America is adopting in large part within capitalism) -- on a course of fifty years of opposing America.
The USA and Europe helped initiate the Cold War through its early actions, even as the Soviet system was corrupted from within by a brutal man who had 30 million of his people shot, thus cementing the Cold War.
Another cause is the brutality of some of revolutionaries, who forgot their ideal in the name of harshly implementing them. It (this violent tendency) is perhaps something that has been there in the psyche of the Russians people in the 20th century, which they are now beginning to shed.
On the other hand the values that were raised during the revolution still resonate with the problems that confront the world such as poverty, justice, the dignity of man, the raising up and concern for the well-being of the individual, etc. Though the Russians might not have had all of the answers they at least raised the questions. Unfortunately, the West would not hear of it at the time, tried to crush it, ushering in a monster like Stalin and then the Cold War.
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