Reappraisals (61 page)

During the first decade of the cold war, espionage, subversion, and Communist takeovers in distant lands were perceived by many in the U.S. as a direct challenge to the “American Way of Life”; Senator McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the Republican Party were able to exploit the security issue in cold war America by pointing to real spies (Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs) as well as imagined ones. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, Klaus Fuchs, George Blake, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, Anthony Blunt, and above all Kim Philby betrayed their country, their colleagues, and hundreds of their fellow agents. Between them they did far more damage to Western interests than any American spy until Aldrich Ames. Yet the serial revelation of their treason—beginning with the arrest of Fuchs in 1950—aroused remarkably little public anxiety. It certainly never provoked in Britain collective paranoia and political conformism on the scale that seized the U.S. in these same years.

The cold war was experienced very differently in Britain from the way it was lived (and is remembered) in the U.S. And things were different again in France and Italy, where between a quarter and a third of the electorate voted for a Communist Party in those years. (The Italian case, where Enrico Berlinguer deftly led his Eurocommunist party out of the Soviet orbit and into the political mainstream, is particularly interesting—but receives no attention from Gaddis.) They were also different in the Netherlands and Denmark, where domestic Communism was nonexistent but active commitment to NATO was perfectly compatible with extensive tolerance for cultural or political difference; or in Austria and Sweden—no less “western” and “democratic” than the U.S. but ostentatiously and self-indulgently “neutral” in cold war confrontations. “Western democracy” can cover a multitude of different political cultures. America’s many friends in postwar Austria were forced to watch in frustration as the libraries of the popular “America Houses” in postwar Vienna, Salzburg, and elsewhere were stripped (on instructions from McCarthy-era Washington) of works by “unsuitable” authors: John Dos Passos, Arthur Miller, Charles Beard, Leonard Bernstein, Dashiell Hammett, Upton Sinclair—and also Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Alberto Moravia, Tom Paine, and Henry Thoreau.
¹²

John Gaddis misses all this. In general he is rather contemptuous of Western Europe: The European Economic Community gets just one passing mention, and if Gaddis spends a little more time on Charles de Gaulle it is only in order to lump him patronizingly with Mao Zedong as the leaders of bumptious “medium powers” who performed “high-wire acrobatics without a net” in order to undermine and sabotage the strategies of their respective superpower patrons. Readers of
The Cold War: A New History
who lack prior familiarity with the subject will be at a loss to understand just why a French president should have behaved so capriciously toward his American protectors, “exasperating” Washington and “flaunting” French autonomy, or what it is about the history of the preceding decades that helps explain French irritation at the “Anglo-Saxon” powers. Nor will they learn anything about de Gaulle’s unquestioning loyalty to the U.S. during the Cuba crisis or the quizzical respect (albeit much tested) with which he was regarded by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. These are nuances—and John Gaddis is not much given to nuance.
¹³

That is a pity, because an account of the cold war that was more sensitive to national variations might have picked up the cultural aspects of the confrontation, to which Gaddis’s history is completely indifferent. The cold war was fought on many fronts, not all of them geographical and some of them within national frontiers. One of these fronts was established by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), inaugurated in Berlin in June 1950, under whose auspices Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, A. J. Ayer, Stephen Spender, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ignazio Silone, Nicolà Chiaromonte, Melvin Lasky, and Sidney Hook set out to challenge and undercut the intellectual appeal of Communism, whose own illustrious supporters and camp followers included on various occasions Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertolt Brecht, Louis Aragon, Elio Vittorini, and many of the best minds of the coming intellectual generation—including in those years François Furet, Leszek Kołakowski, and the youthful Milan Kundera.

Not one of these names, not one—not even the CCF itself or Stalin’s international Peace Movement, which it was set up to oppose—receives a single mention in Gaddis’s history of the cold war. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he misses something else: not just the intense intellectual and cultural confrontations over totalitarianism, Communism, Marxism, and freedom, but also the cold war between the generations. The anti-Fascist generation of the thirties—exemplified by Klaus Mann’s declaration in Paris in 1935: “Whatever Fascism is, we are not and we are against it”— was displaced and fragmented by the anti-Communist generation of the fifties . . . only for both of them to be dismissed by the new radicals of the sixties.
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The latter were uniquely cut off from the political past of their parents’ generation. Alienated from “the West” by its (in their eyes) unbroken links back to Nazi and Fascist regimes—in West Germany, Austria, and Italy above all—and by its neocolonial wars in Africa and Indochina, they had no greater sympathy for the “
crapules staliniennes
” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) of a discredited Communist empire. They thus hung in an uncomfortable and sometimes violent limbo, athwart the international confrontation whose terms of reference they angrily rejected.
¹⁵
This is not a uniquely European story, of course. The cold war changed the United States too, first in the formative years between 1948 and 1953 and again in the later sixties. Young Americans of the same vintage as Cohn-Bendit or Germany’s Joschka Fischer experienced the “peripheral” confrontations of the cold war as a lasting schism within their own culture: One former Harvard student, looking back upon the impact of the Vietnam War on the Harvard Class of ’70, wrote that her generation had “maintained a certain distance, a feeling of being in some ways outsiders to this society in which we are now adults. ”
¹⁶

The cold war may have begun, in a formal sense, in the late 1940s, but its intensity and its longevity only make sense if we understand that it had far older sources. The confrontation between Leninist Communism and the Western democracies dates to 1919; and in countries where Communism struck root in the local labor movement and among the intellectual elite (notably Czechoslovakia, France, and India), it is more coherently thought of as having a domestic history that extends from World War I into the 1980s. In the Soviet Union itself the basic strategies to be deployed in relations with “bourgeois democracies” were forged not in the 1940s but in the 1920s.

Thus détente, which John Gaddis misleadingly presents as an innovation of the seventies—a response to the generational revolts and democratic movements of the previous decade—in fact had its origins in the “wars of position” in which Soviet leaders ever since Lenin saw themselves as engaging against the more powerful West: sometimes taking a conciliatory line (e.g., between 1921 and 1926, during the Popular Fronts of 1934 to 1939, and again at points in the later fifties and early seventies), sometimes presenting an uncompromising “front”—as in the so-called Third Period between 1927 and 1934 and again during the frosty “Two Cultures” standoff between 1947 and 1953. Moreover, détente, too, has its paradoxes: An externally conciliatory Soviet position was often accompanied by (and helped camouflage) the reimposition of domestic repression, as during the Popular Front years or during the antidissident crackdown of the early 1970s.
¹⁷

To ignore the prehistory of cold war politics in this way is to miss some of the most interesting aspects of the story. But perhaps the most revealing of all Gaddis’s omissions is his refusal to make the link between the cold war and what has happened since. He is quite explicit about this: “Nor does [this] book attempt to locate roots, within the Cold War, of such post-Cold War phenomena as globalization, ethnic cleansing, religious extremism, terrorism or the information revolution.” But with the partial exception of the information revolution, these,
pace
Gaddis, are not “post-Cold War phenomena.” Under the guise of proxy confrontations from Central America to Indonesia, both “pacification” and ethnic cleansing—not to speak of religious struggles—were a continuous accompaniment to the cold war. The mass killings of hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Guatemala are just two egregious examples among many. And no one who knew anything about (or had merely lived in) the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, India, Colombia, Algeria, or anywhere in the Middle East could for one minute suppose that “terrorism” was a “post-Cold War phenomenon.”

On the contrary: Far from “settl[ing] fundamental issues once and for all,” as Gaddis would have us believe, the cold war has an intimate, unfinished relationship with the world it left behind: whether for the vanquished Russians, whose troubled postimperial frontier zones from Afghanistan and Chechnya to Armenia, Abkhazia, and Moldova are the unhappy heirs to Stalinist ethnic cleansing and Moscow’s heedless exploitation of local interest and divisions; or for the victorious Americans, whose unconstrained military monopoly ought to have made of the U.S. a universally welcome international policeman but which is instead—thanks to cold war memories as well as the Bush administration’s mistakes—the source of an unprecedented level of popular anti-Americanism.

Indeed, the errors of America’s own post-cold war governments have deep pre-1989 roots. The military buildup and rhetorical overkill of the cold war had their uses in the strategic game playing of those decades and in the need to repress (or reassure) client states and their constituencies. In Washington during the early cold war, influential men talked loudly of bringing democracy and freedom to Eastern Europe. But when the crunch came, in November 1956, they did nothing (and had never intended to do anything, though they neglected to explain this in advance to Hungary’s doomed insurgents). Today things are very different. Big promises of support for democracy and liberty are no longer constrained by risk of nuclear war or even of a Great Power confrontation; but the habit is still with us. During the cold war, however, we were—on the whole—“against” something, reacting to a challenge. Now we are proactive, we are “for” something: an inherently more adventurous and risky position, however vague our objective.
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If Gaddis does not pursue these thoughts it is probably because he is not much troubled by them. To judge from what he has to say about the past, he is unlikely to lose sleep over presidential abuses of power in the present or future. Indeed, Gaddis admonishes Americans for placing restrictions on their elected rulers. Describing what he clearly sees as the regrettable overreaction to Watergate and Vietnam in the 1970s, he writes: “The United States Congress was passing laws—always blunt instruments—to constrain the use of
United States
military and intelligence capabilities. It was as if the nation had become its own worst enemy.” Retrospectively frustrated by such constraints, Gaddis admires the boldness and vision of President George W. Bush. A keen supporter of the recent Iraq war, Gaddis in 2004 even published a guide for the use of American policymakers, showing how preemptive and preventive war making has an honorable place in American history and is to be encouraged—where appropriate—as part of an ongoing project of benevolent interventionism.
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Thus, while it may seem tempting to dismiss John Lewis Gaddis’s history of the cold war as a naively self-congratulatory account that leaves out much of what makes its subject interesting and of continuing relevance, that would be a mistake. Gaddis’s version is perfectly adapted for contemporary America: an anxious country curiously detached from its own past as well as from the rest of the world and hungry for “a fireside fairytale with a happy ending.”
²⁰
The Cold War: A New History
is likely to be widely read in the U.S.: both as history and, in the admiring words of a blurb on the dust jacket, for the “lessons” it can teach us in how to “deal with new threats.” That is a depressing thought.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XXI