The Cold War

Some years ago, while cleaning out their garage, my wife's aunt and uncle came on a scrapbook that she had kept in prep school. It was from 1963, and we pored over the photographs of ski weekends, class play programs, and dance invitations. Among copies of her school newspaper, I spotted a story she had written. It was set in the near future, in a classroom, and it was about the day the Bomb fell: “There was a large quake and the room seemed to turn upside down. We were thrown from our seats. A large crash shattered the window and threw the pieces into the four corners of the room. Sirens screeched. I had difficulty trying to breathe in the fog that now filled the room. We got to our feet and made our way through the crowded halls to the air raid shelter.”

Life, for the narrator, would never be the same. A year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, apocalypse was still on our minds. We were not quite halfway through the Cold War, and the Bomb—Bombs, rather—seemed to be our undeserved future. As I read my wife's story, written in her properly neat schoolgirl script, the memory of the nuclear clock resurfaced, its hands perpetually stuck at one minute to midnight.

The Cold War lasted almost half a century—from 1946 until 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist—and occupied the greater part of our lifetime. (If one accepts the position of historians such as Michael Howard, you can extend its chilling sway back to the October Revolution of 1917.) The expression was apparently coined by the preeminent journalist of the middle years of the century just ended, Walter Lippmann. According to his biographer, Ronald Steele, Lippmann borrowed the phrase from the French
La Guerre Froide,
“The Cold War,” which people used to describe the “Phony War” of 1939.
The Cold War
was the title of a collection of Lippmann columns that appeared at the end of 1947, by which time it was clear that the West was on a collision course with the Soviet Union. The man who handled PR for the self-important financier and presidential confidant Bernard Baruch later claimed that his client was the originator, but there is no evidence to back him up—no speech such as Winston Churchill's “Iron Curtain” pronouncement at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946.

Whatever the origin of the conflict or the expressions that defined it, one thing is clear: The Cold War was a war, and at times a very hot one, even if the two superpowers almost never clashed openly or directly. This anthology details some of the exceptions: the aerial duels between Soviet and Allied pilots over “MiG Alley” in the Korean War (Dennis E. Showalter's “The First Jet War”) and the near shoot-downs of military reconnaissance planes over the Soviet Union (R. Cargill Hall, “The Truth About Overflights”). “Ferrets,” planes that flew along the margins of the Soviet empire, photographing army and navy bases and radar installations, were not always so lucky: At least fifteen were shot down; almost two hundred air crewmen died or disappeared into Soviet prisons. But the destruction of a single aircraft, Major Rudolf Anderson's U-2, over Cuba on October 27, 1962, nearly propelled the world into war. That date must take a dubious pride of place as the most dangerous in the entire Cold War (Dino A. Brugioni, “The Invasion of Cuba”). One is tempted to add those hours, almost exactly a year earlier, when U.S. and Soviet tanks stood muzzle-to-muzzle at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, the only time that ground forces confronted each other, ready to trade shots in anger.

As one perceptive interpreter of the struggle, Martin Walker, has pointed out, “The Cold War was truly a global conflict, more so than either of the cen-tury's two world wars.” One can approach it from many angles—economic, social, political. All are valid, all are interrelated. But the Cold War was primarily a military phenomenon, and its military implications are the subject of this anthology.

In the sense that it was global, involved so many millions, and mobilized such a substantial part of national economies, the Cold War was a total war. It was a struggle that manifested revolutionary and patriotic fervor on both sides: Democracy is as much an ideology as Communism. (The Red Scare was the chief manifestation of that fervor in the U.S.; the various postwar Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union or the cultural revolution in China were its counterparts.) Because there could be no genuine coexistence between the two worldviews—though the sides intermittently paid lip service to the notion— both East and West aimed for total victory. A middle ground was out of the question. For most of those years, the West held a decided edge in wealth and technological sophistication. It managed the feat of producing guns and butter at the same time. The Communist empire couldn't, and didn't, and that may have been its signal weakness and eventual undoing.

Is there a person over the age of thirty whom the Cold War didn't somehow affect? For those of us who are as old as I am (seventy), it occupied most of our adult lives. Serving in the military was a given, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, the years of maximum chill. People I knew did time in Korea and Vietnam; a number are contributors to this book. As children, many of us learned to crouch underneath our school desks, in premature rehearsal for the inevitable. In cities, black circles with yellow triangles, radiation symbols, indicated the presence of fallout shelters stocked with food and water. There, the fortunate survivors of a nuclear blast might hole up days, weeks even, until batterypowered radios notified them that radiation had decreased and it was safe to venture outside—to what? But that was a question one skirted. Talk-show guests argued whether it was ethical to bar interlopers with a gun, even if it was tantamount to a death sentence. Civil defense was clearly something of a boondoggle, but it kept a great many people employed and busy. A war mentality was part of our lives. I remember once, in the early 1970s, I was having problems with the water supply in the Connecticut house I rented. My landlord took me to inspect the pumps. He led me to a concrete structure sunk into a hillside, unlocked a door, and switched on the light. I saw bunks with mouse-eaten mattresses, shelves stocked with rusting food cans, and dusty olive-green containers that held water. The water pump was also located here, and as my landlord checked and adjusted it, I asked him what this artificial grotto was. Oh, he explained, it was once a bomb shelter. “You know—the Great Fear.”

The Great Fear. Although there now seems something faintly ludicrous, even pathetic, about the examples just cited, we also did experience moments of genuine terror. The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of them, perhaps the worst. I can't forget October 27, 1962, a warm and sunny morning when I walked down Broadway on Manhattan's West Side, doing the sort of errands I always did on Saturdays. Suddenly, a thought overwhelmed me: This might be my last weekend on earth. Should I send my then-wife and two small daughters, one of them just five months old, to stay with my parents in the country? It didn't seem such a wild thought. I returned to my apartment to find that Major Anderson had been shot down. But Armageddon would have to wait. My older daughter wanted to go to the park.

George Feifer (who wrote “The Berlin Tunnel,” anthologized here) was a graduate exchange student in Moscow that fall. Few people there, he once told me, were aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Soviet media had blacked out all mention of it. “But they knew something big was up,” he added, “even if we didn't know precisely what until Khrushchev made a talk at the end, hiding lots of things and twisting others into a Soviet victory. I knew much more than most people, because while the crisis was on, I happened to bump into a friend from the American embassy staff on a busy street. He told me. Still, I knew too little to be scared that I might be killed by an American nuclear bomb at any moment.”

The precarious two weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis came close to overshadowing the emergency in Europe of a year earlier, the erection of the Berlin Wall. But the Wall never caused the same amount of trepidation, certainly not among ordinary people, nor in Washington or Moscow. The confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie was one of those dicey moments when overly aggressive subordinate commanders got out of control, as they did, with potentially more dangerous consequences, in Cuba. Although the U.S. publicly fumed and blustered and made calming promises of support to West Germany and the beleaguered citizens of West Berlin, Washington was privately relieved. “It's not a very nice solution,” John F. Kennedy remarked at the time, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” Khrushchev agreed. “We didn't want a military conflict,” he said in the tapes that became his memoirs. “There was no necessity for one. We only wanted to conduct a surgical operation.”

“Surgical” was the right word. By staunching the refugee hemorrhage, the East Germans and their Soviet bosses had saved their nation from dissolving, as it would three decades later when the Wall did come down. A stasis then existed that people on both sides learned to live with. But the Communists paid a high price for their military gamble in Berlin. They had handed the West its most enduring propaganda triumph, one it never lost an opportunity to play up for the rest of the Cold War.

I can testify to the effect that the Wall had on me in the mid-1970s, when it was enjoying its dour heyday. The idea that it might come down in my lifetime seemed inconceivable. The memory of a late-night walk near the Brandenburg Gate, as close as the Wall would allow me to get to East Berlin, is still vaguely unsettling. I became aware of uniformed shadows in a darkened guard tower and of the reflection of West Berlin streetlamps bouncing off binocular glass. But it was more than that. Those binoculars were following me.

“Before I built a wall,” Robert Frost wrote, “I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.” Exactly. Staring from a high floor of a building set against the Wall—I was lunching in the headquarters of a prominent West German newsmagazine—I could see nothing but the shabby buildings and empty streets of East Berlin (propaganda, propaganda). An occasional scurrying figure seemed all but swallowed by the voracious chill of Socialist space. Below, against a backdrop of blocked windows, Dobermans strutted with fierce nervous intensity, ready to maul anyone rash enough to cross the intervening space—if, indeed, a fleeing human could get that far. I might as well have been regarding the yard of a huge open-air prison.

The Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis occupy central places in the history of the Cold War. Thereafter, with one notable exception, the war scare of 1983 (recalled here by John Prados), the long face-off between the U.S.S.R. and the West “took on,” in the words of the historian John Lewis Gaddis,

a certain stability, even predictability, after 1962. Neither side would ever again initiate direct challenges to the other's sphere of influence. Anomalies like a divided Germany and Korea—even absurdities like a walled capitalist West Berlin in the middle of a communist East Germany, or an American naval base on the territory of a Soviet ally just off the coast of Florida—came to seem quite normal…. Not the least of the Cold War's oddities is that its outcome was largely determined before two-thirds of it had even been fought.

The military focus of the Cold War now shifted back to Asia, Vietnam in particular. I'm surprised how many knowledgeable people disassociate the struggles in Southeast Asia from the Cold War. One can argue that the French came out on the losing end of a colonial war, and the Americans of the civil war that followed it. But both the French and the Americans, along with their allies, were fighting Communists: Not just the conquest of territory but the dominance of an ideology was at stake. The part that the Chinese Communists played in displacing the French is incontestable, as both Douglas Porch and Williamson Murray make abundantly clear in these pages. Later, in the war between the two Vietnams, the Chinese and the Soviets fought a war by proxy, pouring the resources of war into the Communist North. It's worth quoting at length the military historian John F. Guilmartin, Jr.:

Vietnam was clearly a major chapter in the Cold War. Viewed from a narrowly military and geographic perspective, it was an unequivocal American defeat. Viewed within the broader context of the Cold War, it was an operational defeat and a strategic victory. The Soviets and the Chinese spent heavily supporting North Vietnam, and in the case of the Soviets, they expended resources that they couldn't spare. When, over the long haul, their bills came due, they couldn't be paid. Vietnam wasn't the only cause of the Soviet decline, or even the biggest one—expenditures on strategic weapons systems were more important, with conventional military hardware close behind. But Vietnam could have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

It would be impossible to list the ways in which the Cold War changed our lives. Wars do that. Let me suggest a few random examples, each of them with a military antecedent.

Jet planes are obvious. The swept-wing B-47 bomber of 1950 is still the model for airliners. Or take Japan's hold on world markets. It is rooted in the early 1950s, when we pumped money into the country, our recent enemy, and made it our main staging base for the Korean War. Take the interstate highway system. It was originally conceived and funded as a way of moving troops and speeding evacuation from cities threatened by nuclear attack. Or Len Deighton and John le Carré: The Cold War turned the spy thriller into a literary genre. Or American popular culture, whether it was Levi's or Elvis Presley—who, after all, served as a private in West Germany. It was first spread by the GI's who garrisoned our Roman Wall. They left behind an enduring legacy of desire for material things. In the end, the Cold War may have been won as much on the sound stages of L.A. as in the missile silos of North Dakota. Not even Stalin's greatest creations, the Iron Curtain and the Red Army, could turn back
Dallas
and
Dynasty,
those television epics of Western (both upper- and lower-case) wealth. I think of Dennis E. Showalter's remark: “It may not have been the Stars and Stripes that rose over Moscow—but the Golden Arches are good enough.” The people on the other side wanted what we had, even if it was our greedy worst.

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