Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (78 page)

37
For more on this, see the author’s
The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe 1933-39
(London/New York, 1984), and
The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East 1933-41
(London/Pittsburgh, 1992).

38
‘Kommissiya Livinova po podgotovke mirnykh dogovorov i poslevoennogo ustroistva. Protokoly i Zasedanii Kommissii’, 31 March- 21 September 1944,
Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossii
(hereafter AVPR), Fond Molotova, Op. 6, Papka 14, dela 141.

39
‘1944. Komissiya t. LITVINOVA po podgotovke mirnykh dogovorov i poslevoennogo ustroistva‘, AVPR, Fond Molotova, Op. 6, Por. 143, Papka 14.

40
For the first detailed discussion of the Voroshilov committee: A. Filitov, ‘Die UdSSR und das Potsdamer Abkommen. Ein langer und leidvoller Weg‘, presented to a conference at Otzenhausen, Germany, 22-26 May 1995, entitled ’Vor 50 Jahren: Die Potsdamer Konferenz. Vorgeschichte, Verlauf und Folge fur Deutschland, Europa und die Welt.’

1
McGeorge Bundy, 1993 Stimson Lecture at Yale University; Robert S. McNamara,
In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
(New York, 1995).

2
Stone’s preposterous thesis received support from historian John Newman, who in
JFK and Vietnam
(New York, 1991) argued that Johnson, on taking office, immediately escalated the war beyond Kennedy’s intentions. See also George Bernau’s novel
Promises to Keep
(New York, 1988). An antidote of sorts is provided by the British satirist Mark Lawson’s recent
Idlewild
(London, 1995).

3
Doris Kearns Goodwin,
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys:
An
American Saga
(New York, 1987), pp. 246-53.

4
Gore Vidal, ‘The Holy Family’, in
idem
,
United States - Essays 1952-1992
(New York, 1992), pp. 809-26.

5
Stephen E. Ambrose,
Eisenhower: The President
(New York, 1984, 1985), vol. II, p. 190.

6
Richard Reeves, President
Kennedy: Profile of Power
(New York, 1993), p. 356.

7
Stephen E. Ambrose,
Nixon: The Education of a Politician 1913- 1962
(New York, 1987), pp. 596f.; Taylor Branch,
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963
(New York, 1988), pp. 344-78.

8
Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States - Bicentennial Edition
(Washington, 1989), p. 308.

9
Reeves,
Kennedy
, pp. 122-6.

10
Ibid
., p. 498.

11
Ibid
., p. 126.

12
Ibid
., pp. 498-502.

13
Harvard Sitkoff,
The Struggle for Black Equality 1954-1992
(New York, 1993), pp. 145-7.

14
Preamble to the Economic Opportunity Act 1964.

15
George M. Kahin,
Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam
(New York, 1986), pp. 17-20.

16
George C. Herring,
America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1973
(2nd edn, New York, 1986), p. 57.

17
Herring,
Longest War
, pp. 51f., 57; Kahin,
Intervention
, pp. 75-7.

18
Reeves,
Kennedy
, pp. 254, 559.

19
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr,
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
(New York, 1965, 1971), p. 156.

20
Reeves,
Kennedy
, p. 112.

21
Foreign Relations of the United States 1961-1963
, vol. I:
Vietnam 1961
(Washington, 1988), No. 42, Memorandum from the Deputy Secretary of Defense to the President, 3 May 1961, p. 93.

22
Ibid
., p. 97.

23
FRUS
, vol. I, Attachment to No. 42, ‘A Program of Action to Prevent Communist Domination of South Vietnam’, 1 May 1961, pp. 93-115.

24
Ibid
., No. 52, National Security Action Memorandum, 11 May 1961, pp. 132-4.

25
Lloyd C. Gardner,
Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars of Vietnam
(Chicago, 1995), pp. 54f.; Robert D. Schulzinger,
A Time for War
, (Oxford, forthcoming) ch. V.

26
FRUS
, vol. I, No. 60, Report by the Vice-President, undated.

27
Ibid
., No. 99, Bundy to Lemnitzer, 19 July 1961, pp. 233f.

28
Ibid
., Komer to Rostow, 20 July 1961, p. 234.

29
Schulzinger,
A Time for War
, ch. V.

30
FRUS
, vol. I, No. 210, Letter from Maxwell Taylor enclosing report and attachments, 3 November 1961, pp. 477-532.

31
Ibid
., No. 233, Memorandum from Rostow to the President, 11 November 1961, pp. 573-5.

32
Ibid
., No. 214, Draft Memorandum from the Secretary of Defense to the President, 5 November 1961, pp. 538-40.

33
Ibid
., No. 254, ‘Notes on NSC Meeting’, 15 November 1961, pp. 607-10.

34
Ibid
., No. 272, NSAM No. 111, 22 November 1961, pp.656f.; Schulzinger,
A Time for War
, ch. V.

35
Herring,
Longest War
, p. 65.

36
Reeves,
Kennedy
, p. 444.

37
New York Times
, 7 January 1963; Reeves,
Kennedy
, p. 446.

38
Reeves,
Kennedy
, p. 446; Schulzinger,
A Time for War
, ch. V.

39
Foreign Relations of the United States 1961-1963
, vol. III:
Vietnam, January-August 1963
(Washington, 1991), No. 112, Telegram from the Hue Consulate, 9 May 1963, pp. 277f.

40
Schulzinger,
A Time for War
, ch. V.

41
FRUS, vol. III, Nos 163 and 164, Saigon to State Department, 11 June 1963, pp. 374-6.

42
Ibid
., No. 249, Michael Forrestal Memorandum to the President, 9 August 1963, pp. 559f.; Schulzinger,
A Time for War
, ch. V.

43
FRUS
, vol. III, No. 230, Telegram from the State Department to the Embassy in Vietnam, 19 July 1963, p. 517.

44
Reeves,
Kennedy
, p. 528.

45
FRUS
, vol. III, No. 254, Editorial Note, p. 567.

46
Foreign Relations of the United States 1961-1963
, vol. IV:
Vietnam: August-December 1963
(Washington, 1991), No. 167, Memorandum from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense to the President, 2 October 1963, pp. 336-46.

47
Reeves,
Kennedy
, p. 620.

48
Ibid
., p. 638.

49
FRUS
, vol. IV, pp. 427-537; Reeves,
Kennedy
, pp. 643-50.

50
Schulzinger,
A Time for War
, ch. VI.

51
McNamara,
Retrospect
, pp. 86f.; Reeves,
Kennedy
, pp. 586f.

52
Schulzinger,
A Time for War
, ch. VI. On Johnson’s Vietnam travails as President see Gardner,
Pay Any Price
, and Schulzinger,
A Time for War
.

1
Timothy Garton Ash,
We the People: The Revolution of ‘89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin & Prague
(Cambridge, 1990), p. 139.

2
Time
, 23 June 1980.

3
David Lane,
State and Politics in the USSR
(Oxford, 1985), pp. 257, 311, 313. My emphasis.

4
J. Hough,
Russia and the West
(New York, 1990), pp. 205-7.

5
Quoted in Denis Healey,
The Time of my Life
(Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 531. My emphasis.

6
Modrow was quoted in
Focus
, 44, 31 October 1994, p. 29. For a long but by no means definitive list of Stasi officers and informers in the Modrow government and the so-called Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), see
Der Spiegel
, 9 October 1995, pp. 84-92.

7
For the underlying reinforcement of Soviet economic weakness by
perestroika
, see Marshall I. Goldman,
What Went Wrong with Perestroika?
(London, 1991).

8
For the GDR’s ’objective’ economic problems and its unconventional ways round them, see Wolfgang Seiffert and Norbert Treutwein,
Die Schalk-Papiere: DDR-Mafia zwischen Ost und West
(Munich, 1992). For the ease with which it could still raise money in the West, see the testimony in Peter Wyden,
Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin
(New York, 1989), p. 606.

9
See Robert L. Hutchings,
Soviet-East European Relations: Consolidation and Conflict
(Madison, 1983), p. 193.

10
Quoted in BBC,
Summary of World Broadcasts
, EE/2135, 25 October 1994, A9. See also Georges Mink and Jean-Charles Szurek (eds), Cet
etrange post-communisme: rupture et transitions en Europe centrale et orientale
(Paris, 1992), esp. pp. 75-6.

11
See Judy Shelton,
The Coming Soviet Crash: Gorbachev’s Desperate Pursuit of Credit in Western Financial Markets
(London, 1989), pp. 171-2.

12
See my
Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkans
(London, 1994), pp. 31-57, for Western antagonism to small states seceding from either the USSR or socialist Yugoslavia. Bush’s Kiev speech was echoed by Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, three years later when he endorsed President Yeltsin’s onslaught on Chechnya: ‘It’s not in our interests, or certainly in theirs, to have a sort of disintegrating Russia, so I think he has done what he had to do to prevent this republic from breaking away.... But I think you have to understand what’s happening there is within the Russian Federation and this particular republic is trying to leave the Federation and President Yeltsin is dealing with that.’ As broadcast on
Today
, BBC Radio 4, 14 December 1994.

13
See Bob Woodward,
The Commanders
(New York, 1991), p. 226.

14
See Jacques Attali,
Verbatim: III
, as quoted in ‘Wir können Deutschland schließlich nicht den Krieg erklären’ in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, 12 October 1995.

15
Quoted in J. Laughland,
The Death of Politics: France under Mitterrand
(London, 1994), p. 255. See also Georges Bortoli,
Une si longue bienveillance: les Français et l’URSS, 1944-1991
(Paris, 1994), pp. 222f.

16
For Andreotti’s endorsement of military repression, see my
Europe’s Backyard War
, pp. 42-6.

17
From left to right, the German establishment was cosy with the existence of the GDR and only a few of its doyens who actually made visits there ever questioned its viability. Jürgen Habermas may stand representative of a generation of the German ‘critical’ intelligentsia who noticed something was not quite right only in 1988 and even then never expected an end of the other German state. He told Adam Michnik: ’Naturally I was as astonished as most Germans [by the fall of the Wall]. I went to the GDR, to Halle, for the first time in the summer of 1988. The spiritual state of the people ... was devastating. They were cynical and desperate. Nothing remained of any kind of optimistic prospects.
Retrospectively
I was conscious of how far this system had eroded by then. But
of course
I did not anticipate the end‘; see
Die Zeit
, 17 December 1993. The degree to which the West German elite rejected dissidents and defectors is illustrated by the way in which
even after reunification
the ex-Communists Stefan Heym and Gregor Gysi were able to block the participation of an ex-dissident Freya Klier in the television programme
Talk im Turm
because she had drawn attention to Gysi’s past collaboration with the Stasi. Heym dismissed ’human rights activists’ as ‘neurotics who cannot abide that since the change [in 1989] they have lost significance’. See
Focus
, 28 November 1994, p. 25. The defector Oleg Gordievsky once told me that he had not been allowed on the platform at a conference in Aschaffenburg sponsored by the supposedly conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union, while unrepentant former KGB and Stasi generals, Leonid Scherbashin and Misha Wolf, were treated as honoured guests. In October 1989, Vaclav Havel recalled how stand-offish the West German elite had been towards dissidents like him whose critical activities they feared might damage the atmosphere of detente. The Germans were not alone. It was the Gaullist ‘baron’ Michel Debré who called the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ‘a traffic accident on the road to detente’. German conservatives too saw it as
removing
an obstacle to detente! See Timothy Garton Ash,
In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent
(London, 1994), pp. 280, 470.

18
Any contemplation of the staggering degree of Stasi penetration of West Germany and the complete failure of West German intelligence (led by the future Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel) to achieve any comparable successes leads one to question the value of bourgeois intelligence services and to ponder how the Chekists could not have noticed the impending fall of their own home base. For Kanter, see Der Spiegel, 7 November 1994, p. 17.