The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (English) Paperback Book

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Beginning with World War II and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the author provides a thrilling account of the strategic dynamics that drove the age. The work is rich with illuminating portraits of its major personalities and fresh insight into its most crucial events.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

"Outstanding . . . The most accessible distillation of that conflict yet written." —The Boston Globe"Energetically written and lucid, it makes an ideal introduction to the subject." —The New York TimesThe "dean of Cold War historians" (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own.Gaddis is also the author of On Grand Strategy.

Author Biography

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. His previous books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War; Strategies of Containment; The Long Peace; We Now Know; The Landscape of History; Surprise, Security, and the American Experience; and The Cold War: A New History. Professor Gaddis teaches courses on Cold War history, grand strategy, international studies, and biography; has won two Yale undergraduate teaching awards; was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal; and is the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for George F. Kennan.

Table of Contents

The Cold WarPrefaceList of MapsPrologue: The View ForwardI. The Return Of FearII. Deathboats And LifeboatsIII. Command Versus SpontaneityIV. The Emergence Of AutonomyV. The Recovery Of EquityVI. ActorsVII. The Triumph Of HopeEpilogue: The View BackNotesBibliographyIndex

Review

"Outstanding . . . The most accessible distillation of that conflict yet written." —The Boston Globe"Energetically written and lucid, it makes an ideal introduction to the subject." —The New York Times"A fresh and admirably concise history . . . Gaddis's mastery of the material, his fluent style and eye for the telling anecdote make his new work a pleasure." —The Economist

Long Description

The dean of Cold War historians ("The New York Times") now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but "why"from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, "The Cold War" stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own.

Review Quote

Outstanding ... The most accessible distillation of that conflict yet written. ( The Boston Globe ) Energetically written and lucid, it makes an ideal introduction to the subject. ( The New York Times ) A fresh and admirably concise history . . . Gaddis

Excerpt from Book

PROLOGUE THE VIEW FORWARD IN 1946 a forty-three-year-old Englishman named Eric Blair rented a house at the edge of the world--a house in which he expected to die. It was on the northern tip of the Scottish island of Jura, at the end of a dirt track, inaccessible by automobile, with no telephone or electricity. The nearest shop, the only one on the island, was some twenty-five miles to the south. Blair had reasons to want remoteness. Dejected by the recent death of his wife, he was suffering from tuberculosis and would soon begin coughing up blood. His country was reeling from the costs of a military victory that had brought neither security, nor prosperity, nor even the assurance that freedom would survive. Europe was dividing into two hostile camps, and the world seemed set to follow. With atomic bombs likely to be used, any new war would be apocalyptic. And he needed to finish a novel. Its title was 1984 , an inversion of the year in which he completed it, and it appeared in Great Britain and the United States in 1949 under Blair''s pen name, George Orwell. The reviews, the New York Times noted, were "overwhelmingly admiring," but "with cries of terror rising above the applause."1 This was hardly surprising because 1984 evoked an age, only three and a half decades distant, in which totalitarianism has triumphed everywhere. Individuality is smothered, along with law, ethics, creativity, linguistic clarity, honesty about history, and even love--apart, of course, from the love everyone is forced to feel for the Stalin-like dictator "Big Brother" and his counterparts, who run a world permanently at war. "If you want a picture of the future," Orwell''s hero Winston Smith is told, as he undergoes yet another session of relentless torture, "imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."2 Orwell did die early in 1950--in a London hospital, not on his island--knowing only that his book had impressed and frightened its first readers. Subsequent readers responded similarly: 1984 became the single most compelling vision in the post-World War II era of what might follow it. As the real year 1984 approached, therefore, comparisons with Orwell''s imaginary year became inescapable. The world was not yet totalitarian, but dictators dominated large parts of it. The danger of war between the United States and the Soviet Union--two superpowers instead of the three Orwell had anticipated--seemed greater than it had for many years. And the apparently permanent conflict known as the "Cold War," which began while Orwell was still alive, showed not the slightest signs of ending. But then, on the evening of January 16, 1984, an actor Orwell would have recognized from his years as a film reviewer appeared on television in his more recent role as president of the United States. Ronald Reagan''s reputation until this moment had been that of an ardent Cold Warrior. Now, though, he envisaged a different future: Just suppose with me for a moment that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm with a Jim and Sally, and that there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted. Would they then deliberate the differences between their respective governments? Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living? . . . They might even have decided that they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon. Above all, they would have proven that people don''t make wars.3 It was an unexpectedly gentle invitation for human faces to prevail over boots, dictators, and the mechanisms of war. It set in motion, in Orwell''s year 1984, the sequence of events by which they would do so. Just over a year after Reagan''s speech, an ardent enemy of totalitarianism took power in the Soviet Union. Within six years, that country''s control over half of Europe had collapsed. Within eight, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--the country that had provoked Orwell''s great gloomy prophecy in the first place--had itself ceased to exist. These things did not happen simply because Reagan gave a speech or because Orwell wrote a book: the remainder of this book complicates the causation. It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail. CHAPTER ONE THE RETURN OF FEAR We waited for them to come ashore. We could see their faces. They looked like ordinary people. We had imagined something different. Well, they were Americans! --LIUBOVA KOZINCHENKA, Red Army, 58th Guards Division I guess we didn''t know what to expect from the Russians, but when you looked at them and examined them, you couldn''t tell whether, you know? If you put an American uniform on them, they could have been American! --AL ARONSON, U.S. Army, 69th Infantry Division1 THIS WAS THE WAY the war was supposed to end: with cheers, handshakes, dancing, drinking, and hope. The date was April 25, 1945, the place the eastern German city of Torgau on the Elbe, the event the first meeting of the armies, converging from opposite ends of the earth, that had cut Nazi Germany in two. Five days later Adolf Hitler blew his brains out beneath the rubble that was all that was left of Berlin. Just over a week after that, the Germans surrendered unconditionally. The leaders of the victorious Grand Alliance, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin, had already exchanged their own handshakes, toasts, and hopes for a better world at two wartime summits--Teheran in November, 1943, and Yalta in February, 1945. These gestures would have meant little, though, had the troops they commanded not been able to stage their own more boisterous celebration where it really counted: on the front lines of a battlefield from which the enemy was now disappearing. Why, then, did the armies at Torgau approach one another warily, as if they''d been expecting interplanetary visitors? Why did the resemblances they saw seem so surprising--and so reassuring? Why, despite these, did their commanders insist on separate surrender ceremonies, one for the western front at Reims, in France, on May 7th, another for the eastern front in Berlin on May 8th? Why did the Soviet authorities try to break up spontaneous pro-American demonstrations that erupted in Moscow following the official announcement of the German capitulation? Why did the American authorities, during the week that followed, abruptly suspend critical shipments of Lend-Lease aid to the U.S.S.R., and then resume them? Why did Roosevelt''s key aide Harry Hopkins, who had played a decisive role in crafting the Grand Alliance in 1941, have to rush to Moscow six weeks after his boss''s death to try to save it? Why for that matter, years later, would Churchill title his memoir of these events Triumph and Tragedy ? The answer to all of these questions is much the same: that the war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war--ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily--with one another. Whatever the Grand Alliance''s triumphs in the spring of 1945, its success had always depended upon the pursuit of compatible objectives by incompatible systems. The tragedy was this: that victory would require the victors either to cease to be who they were, or to give up much of what they had hoped, by fighting the war, to attain. I. HAD THERE really been an alien visitor on the banks of the Elbe in April, 1945, he, she, or it might indeed have detected superficial resemblances in the Russian and American armies that met there, as well as in the societies from which they had come. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world. Both, as continental states, had advanced across vast frontiers: they were at the time the first and third largest countries in the world. And both had entered the war as the result of surprise attack: the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941, and the Japanese strike against Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which Hitler used as an excuse to declare war on the United States four days later. That would have been the extent of the similarities, though. The differences, as any terrestrial observer could have quickly pointed out, were much greater. The American Revolution, which had happened over a century and a half earlier, reflected a deep distrust of concentrated authority. Liberty and justice, the Founding Fathers had insisted, could come only through constraining power. Thanks to an ingenious constitution, their geographical isolation from potential rivals, and a magnificent endowment of natural resources, the Americans managed to build an extraordinarily powerful state, a fact that became obvious during World War II. They accomplished this, however, by severely restricting their government''s capacity to control everyday life, whether through the dissemination of ideas, the organization of the economy, or the conduct of politics. Despite the legacy of slavery, the near extermination of native Americans, and persistent racial, sexual, and social discrimination, the citizens of the United States could plausibly claim, in 1945, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth. The Bolshevik Revolution, which had happened only a quarter century earlier, had in contrast involved the embrace of concentrated authority as a means of overthrowing class

Details ISBN0143038273 Author John Lewis Gaddis Short Title COLD WAR Language English ISBN-10 0143038273 ISBN-13 9780143038276 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 909.825 Illustrations Yes Residence CT, US Affiliation Yale University DOI 10.1604/9780143038276 Subtitle A New History Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2006-12-26 NZ Release Date 2006-12-26 US Release Date 2006-12-26 UK Release Date 2006-12-26 Pages 352 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Year 2006 Publication Date 2006-12-26 Imprint Penguin USA Audience General We've got this

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