Reappraisals (60 page)

Any history of the cold war that pays sustained attention to such issues of high strategy is likely to have its gaze firmly fixed upon the Great Powers. So it is with Gaddis. However, his close familiarity with the history of American foreign policy is not matched by a comparable expertise in the sources and psychology of Soviet strategic calculation. Gaddis’s account of American statesmen and their doings is detailed and lively. His coverage of Soviet behavior, by contrast, is conventional and two-dimensional. What emerges is a history of the cold war narrated as a superpower confrontation, but largely from the perspective of just one of those powers.

Until the fall of the Soviet Union, such unbalanced accounts were the norm. Little reliable information was available about Soviet thinking. Political observers were thus reduced either to “Kremlinology”—scouring speeches, newspaper editorials, and podium lineups—or else to deducing Communist behavior from Marxist principles. But as Gaddis himself has demonstrated elsewhere, we now know quite a lot about the thinking behind Soviet policies—rather more, in fact, than we do about some Western undertakings, thanks to the opening of Communist archives. So if
The Cold War: A New History
is so heavily weighted toward an American perspective, this cannot be an effect of unbalanced sources.
³

It turns out to be the product of a decidedly partial viewpoint. Gaddis is an unapologetic triumphalist. America won the cold war because Americans deserved to win it. Unlike the Russians, they were “impatient with hierarchy, at ease with flexibility, and profoundly distrustful of the notion that theory should determine practice rather than the other way around.” As the cold war got under way, only America understood what “justice” meant:

For the Americans, that term meant political democracy, market capitalism, and—in principle if not always in practice—respect for the rights of individuals. For the British and French, still running colonial empires, it meant something short of that. . . . And for Stalin’s Soviet Union, “justice” meant the unquestioning acceptance of authoritarian politics, command economies, and the right of the proletariat to advance, by whatever means the dictatorship that guided it chose to employ, toward a worldwide “classless” society.

Even Gaddis is constrained to concede that in their pursuit of justice American statesmen occasionally resorted to shady dealings and tactics. But he insists that whereas politicians elsewhere (in China, in the Soviet Union, in Western Europe) might be congenital sinners and cynics, for Americans this was something new—a by-product of the cold war itself. American statesmen were forced to import the moral ambiguities of foreign conflicts into which they were being drawn:

And so the Cold War transformed American leaders into Machiavellians. Confronted with “so many who are not good,” they resolved “to learn to be able not to be good” themselves, and to use this skill or not use it, as the great Italian cynic—or patriot—had put it, “according to necessity.”

No doubt intended to flatter Truman and his colleagues, this irenic account of the loss of American innocence has the reverse effect. It bathes U.S. history before the cold war in a sort of prelapsarian glow, while implausibly portraying worldly, cosmopolitan diplomats like Harriman, Acheson, Kennan, Bohlen, and others as a generation of benign provincial gentlemen reluctantly obliged to compromise their ethics and adopt the sophisticated, worldly wiles of their foes in order to overcome them.

Appropriately enough, Gaddis’s way of narrating cold war history reflects the same provincialism he foists approvingly upon his American protagonists. In part this is a matter of style—the author resorts quite often to down-home cliché: Eastern Europe in 1956 was a “powder keg,” Communism was “like a building constructed on quicksand.” At times he edges close to bathos: Richard Nixon was defeated by “an adversary more powerful than either the Soviet Union or the international communist movement. It was the Constitution of the United States of America.” But this folksy prose—while maladapted to the broad-brush historical overviews Gaddis occasionally attempts (“Karl Marx knew little about penguins, but he did acknowledge, in the sexist terminology of 1852, that ‘Men make their own history’”)—is also a function of his terms of reference. John Lewis Gaddis has written a history of
America
’s cold war: as seen from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to many American readers.

As a result, this is a book whose silences are especially suggestive. The “third world” in particular comes up short. How we look at international history is always in some measure a function of where we stand. But it takes a uniquely parochial perspective—and one ill-becoming someone described by Michael Beschloss in the
New York Times Book Review
as “a scholar of extraordinary gifts” offering “his long-awaited retrospective verdict on the cold war”—to publish a history of the cold war containing not even an index entry for Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, Grenada, or El Salvador, not to speak of Mozambique, the Congo, or Indonesia. Major events in Iran—where the CIA’s 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq is still held against the U.S.—and Guatemala (where the U.S. toppled Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán on June 27, 1954, precipitating decades of armed and bloody conflict) each receive passing acknowledgment from Gaddis, summarized thus: “The consequences, in both regions, proved costly.”

Indeed so. But those costs are never analyzed, much less incorporated into the author’s evaluation of the cold war as a whole. For Gaddis, as for so many American politicians and statesmen, the “third world” was a sideshow, albeit one in which hundreds of thousands of the performers got killed.
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And he seems to believe that whatever unfortunate developments took place in the course of these peripheral scuffles, they were confined to the cold war’s early years. Later, things improved: “The 1970s were not the 1950s.” Well, yes they were—in El Salvador, for example, not to mention Chile. But this sort of tunnel vision, tipping most of the world offstage and focusing exclusively upon Great Power confrontations in Europe or East Asia, is the price Gaddis pays for placing himself firmly in Washington, D.C., when “thinking” the cold war. For the other superpower saw the cold war very differently.

Seen from Moscow, the cold war was in very substantial measure
about
the non-European world. While President Kennedy and his advisers worried in October 1962 that Nikita Khrushchev’s Cuban missiles were a diversionary prelude to an attack on Berlin, the Soviet leadership (who were irritated by their East German clients and really didn’t care much about Berlin except as a diplomatic pawn) dreamed of a revolutionary front in Latin America. “For a quarter of a century,” one expert writes, “the KGB, unlike the CIA, believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War.”
⁵
In pursuit of local influence on the African continent, Moscow fueled a huge arms boom there from the early seventies through the onset of perestroika. Indeed, it is precisely those African countries most corrupted by the “proxy” wars of the later cold war that were to become the “failed states” of our own time—one of a number of ways in which the cold war and the post-cold war eras are intimately intertwined, though you would not learn this from Gaddis.

In Africa, as in Latin America, the cold war was a clash of empires rather than ideologies. Both sides supported and promoted unsavory puppets and surrogates. But whereas the Soviet Union treated its impoverished third-world clients with cynical disdain and did not even pretend to be in the business of promoting “democracy” or freedom, the U.S.
did—
which is why it was so much more vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy, whether supporting authoritarian regimes in Spain or Portugal, venal and corrupt rulers in Vietnam or Egypt, “terrorists” in Afghanistan, or outright dictatorships from Tierra del Fuego to the Mexican border. As a consequence, for all the very real appeal of its music, its clothes, its films, and its way of life (not to speak of its limitless resources), the U.S. would largely fail in later years to reap the benefits of its cold war engagements. It is one of the ironies of the cold war that America’s victories in Europe were frequently offset by long-term damage to its reputation farther afield: in Vietnam, for example, or the Middle East. The Soviet Union was not the only “loser” in the cold war.

Again, readers will learn little of these complexities in Gaddis’s account, much less of their implications for U.S. foreign policy today. To the extent that he responds implicitly to criticisms of American missteps—and worse—in Latin America and elsewhere in the course of these decades, Gaddis appears to take the view that these were unfortunate things; for the most part they had to be done; and, anyway, they are all behind us. One is reminded of Marlowe’s Barabas:

Barnardine
: Thou hast committed—
Barabas
: Fornication? But that was in another country, and besides,
the wench is dead.
⁶

Gaddis pays more attention to the nations within the Soviet bloc itself. But what he has to say about them, though well intentioned, inspires little confidence. Václav Havel is described as “the most influential chronicler of his generation’s disillusionment with communism.” But Havel suffered no such disillusionment: He never was a Communist. The rather isolated son of a wealthy family, dispossessed and discriminated against by the Communist authorities, Václav Havel took no part in his contemporaries’ flirtation with Marxism. He is said by Gaddis to have given voice to a widespread vision in Eastern Europe of “a society in which universal morality, state morality, and individual morality might all be the same thing.” (Gaddis isn’t very good with political abstractions, but one sees what he means.) This would be nice if it were true; but sadly, in the twelve years between its founding and the fall of Communism, Havel’s Charter 77 attracted fewer than two thousand signatures in a Czechoslovak population of fifteen million.

Havel was elected as the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia precisely because he had spent much of the previous two decades in prison or under house arrest and was untainted by any links to the regime’s discredited past or its ideology; but his moralized rhetoric never sat comfortably with the nation at large. Though Havel had many friends in the former dissident intelligentsia of Central Europe, he aroused little popular affection outside of Bohemia itself (he was not much loved even in neighboring Slovakia). A more influential and representative chronicler of his generation’s lost illusions and post-Communist trajectory would be Havel’s Polish fellow dissident Adam Michnik, or even the Hungarian economist János Kornai. But neither is mentioned by Gaddis.

Gaddis’s thumbnail sketches of Communist doctrine are clunky and a bit embarrassing. Of Marxism as an ideological project he has this to say: “Marxism brought hope to the poor, fear to the rich, and left governments somewhere in between. To rule solely on behalf of the bourgeoisie seemed likely to ensure revolution, thereby confirming Marx’s prophecy; but to do so only for the proletariat would mean that Marx’s revolution had already arrived.”

He explains that Brezhnev-era Communism was justified by an appeal to “ideology: to the claim that, in Marxism-Leninism, they had discovered the mechanisms by which history worked, and thus the means by which to improve the lives people lived.” Of Margaret Thatcher’s electoral popularity Gaddis concludes, “[it] was a blow to Marxism, for if capitalism really did exploit ‘the masses,’ why did so many among them cheer the ‘iron lady’?” This is history writing at one notch above the level of the tabloid editorial.
⁷

And indeed, when it comes to Eastern Europe under Communism, Gaddis does little more than hastily recycle received wisdom. In a work of 333 pages, Tito’s break with Stalin gets just one paragraph; the Hungarian revolution of 1956 merits a mere twenty-seven lines (whereas page after page is devoted to Watergate); meanwhile John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan (“one of its [the U.S.’s] sharpest strategists ever”) are credited at some length with bringing down Communism.
⁸
As for Mikhail Gorbachev, Gaddis’s account of him gives the Reagan administration full credit for many of Gorbachev’s own opinions, ideas, and achievements—as well it might, since in this section of the book Gaddis is paraphrasing and citing Secretary of State George Shultz’s memoirs.
⁹
Here and elsewhere, as the Communist regimes fall like bowling pins and the U.S. emerges resplendent, vindicated and victorious,
The Cold War: A New History
reads like the ventriloquized autobiography of an Olympic champion.

THERE IS REMARKABLY little in this book about spies (and what there is, once again, concerns mostly American spies). This is odd, considering the importance of intelligence gathering during the cold war and since. Spying was one of the few things that the Soviet bloc could do well—the East German foreign intelligence network in particular, run for thirty-three years by the late Markus (“Mischa”) Wolf, was highly regarded for its techniques by both sides. The paradoxes of intelligence, generally ignored by Gaddis, are often quite interesting. Thus the USSR, whose own scientific and technical achievements lagged behind those of the West, compensated by stealing techniques and information from the West and incorporating them into weapons systems and aeronautics in particular. This—together with disinformation, self-delusion, and professional self-interest—led Western intelligence agencies (the CIA especially) to overestimate Soviet capacities and strengths and frighten their political leaders accordingly.
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Had Gaddis thought more about spies and spying, he might have avoided one particularly revealing error that highlights his self-confinement within the straitjacket of American domestic experience. Although there is only one mention in his book of McCarthyism, Gaddis uses that occasion to write that “it was not at all clear that the western democracies themselves could retain the tolerance for dissent and the respect for civil liberties that distinguished them from the dictators.” But Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American original. There was no McCarthyism in Britain, or France, or Norway, or Italy, or the Netherlands. Numerous victims of McCarthyism—whether actors, singers, musicians, playwrights, trade unionists, or history professors—came to live in Western Europe in these years and flourished there.
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Tolerance and civil liberties were not under threat in all “the western democracies.” They were under threat in the United States. There is a difference.