And You Were (Are) There

To have lived in the Athens of Socrates, the Rome of Augustus, the Christendom of Charlemagne, or the Philadelphia of the Constitutional Convention—ah, what stories we would have to tell. Yet all of us, even most young people among us, have lived in a period of the highest historical drama. To mention it now, however, is so, well, so yesterday. The drama was the Cold War, and it will likely be a long time before the story is so well told as it is told by John Lewis Gaddis, the distinguished professor of history at Yale University, in The Cold War: A New History.

“For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distractions, and moral compromises, the Cold War—like the American Civil War—was a necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all. We have no reason to miss it. But, given the alternatives, we have little reason to regret its having occurred.” That’s a big judgment, and maybe Gaddis is right. One can imagine other ways in which the question of slavery in America might have been settled once and for all. And, by his own telling, Gaddis knows that there were contingencies and personalities that might have made the Cold War something very different from what it was. Further, I’m not at all sure about that “once and for all.” I suppose it depends on what “fundamental issues” one has in mind. The conflict between truth and freedom, on the one hand, and oppression in the service of a beguiling delusion, on the other, is never definitively settled. At least not before Our Lord’s return in glory.

At its beginning, the outcome of the Cold War was by no means self-evident, given the “correlation of forces,” as Marxists used to say. “It was at least as easy to believe in 1945,” writes Gaddis, “that authoritarian communism was the wave of the future as that democratic capitalism was.” In resisting Communist advances in Greece and Turkey, a much-scorned and widely underestimated American president announced in 1947 that it now “must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures. . . . We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.” That was the Truman Doctrine that gave formal shape to a war that lasted more than forty years.

From the beginning through to the end, the conflict was shadowed by the threat of atomic and hydrogen weaponry. Millions of Americans alive today remember crouching under school desks in practice alerts. In the early 1950s, George Kennan, father of the doctrine of the “containment” of communism, noted that the use of force had historically been “a means to an end other than warfare, . . . an end which at least did not negate the principle of life itself.” All that changed with the possession of atomic and hydrogen bombs. Kennan wrote: “[These weapons] reach backward beyond the frontiers of western civilization to the concepts of warfare that were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes. They cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. They fail to take into account the ultimate responsibility of men for one another, and even for each other’s errors and mistakes. They imply the admission that man not only can be but is his own worst and most terrible enemy.”

The lesson he drew was from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

Power into will, will into appetite
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey
And last eat himself up.

Throughout his life, Harry Truman claimed in public that he had not lost a moment’s sleep over his decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. His actions and his private reflections suggest otherwise. On the day the bomb was first tested in the New Mexico desert, he wrote in his journal that “machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, and when morals catch up perhaps there will be no reason for any of it.” A year later, he wrote, “The human animal and his emotions change not much from age to age. He must change now or he faces absolute and complete destruction, and maybe the insect age or an atmosphereless planet will succeed him.” We owe it to Truman, writes Gaddis, that he removed decision-making control over atomic weapons from the military. “He reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be used.”

Throughout the Cold War, there were anti-anti-Communist liberals who belittled the reality of Soviet espionage. Worry about Communist spies and sympathizers was dismissed as “McCarthyism,” referring to Senator Joseph McCarthy who did so much to discredit the cause that he claimed to serve. But the espionage was real. Gaddis writes, “It is likely, indeed, that during the first years of the postwar era, Soviet intelligence knew more about American atomic bombs than the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff did. Moscow’s spies—having penetrated the top levels of the British intelligence establishment—were that good, while Truman’s determination to maintain civilian supremacy over his own military establishment was that strong.”

Eisenhower, says Gaddis, was “at once the most subtle and brutal strategist of the nuclear age.” War means a contest, he told a friend, but what kind of contest is it when “the outlook comes close to destruction of the enemy and suicide for ourselves?” In 1959 he declared that, if war came, “you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself.” Yet Eisenhower insisted that if the Soviets launched an atomic attack, the United States would respond in kind. “It was,” writes Gaddis, “as if Eisenhower was in denial: that a kind of nuclear autism had set in, in which he refused to listen to the advice he got from the best minds available.” Then Gaddis adds, “In retrospect, though, it appears that Eisenhower’s may have been the best mind available, for he understood better than his advisers what war is really like.”

Enter M.A.D.—“Mutual Assured Destruction”—under John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara. After the Cuban missile crisis, the point at which the world came close to a nuclear exchange, the doctrine was that the horror of nuclear war was the best guarantee that there would be no nuclear war. Gaddis observes: “That, however, was simply a restatement of what Eisenhower had long since concluded: that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather the survival of states required that there be no war at all.” It should be noted, however, that war continued, and continues, to be an instrument of statecraft—so long as it does not involve the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons.

A War of Ideas

The Cold War was, at bottom, a war of ideas. It began long before what we call the Cold War with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918, which Gaddis calls “the single most influential statement of an American ideology in the twentieth century.” It was a direct response to the ideological challenge posed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and “there began at this point a war of ideas—a contest between visions—that would extend through the rest of World War I, the interwar years, World War II, and most of the Cold War.”

Many American thinkers were made uneasy by Wilson’s “absolutism.” Many openly sympathized with the Soviet Union, seeing it as “the future that works.” Others were deeply ambivalent. In 1943, a noted theologian wrote, “Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or of equality is a source of unending debate.” That was, in 1943, the tough-minded Reinhold Niebuhr, who later would become among the staunchest of anti-Communist liberals.

Here is how Gaddis describes the conflict of visions that defined the Cold War: “Both of the ideologies that defined those worlds were meant to offer hope: that is why one has an ideology in the first place. One of them, however, had come to depend for its functioning on the creation of fear. The other had no need to do so. Therein lay the basic ideological asymmetry of the Cold War.” It needs to be added that the cultivation of a well-founded fear that the other side might prevail was essential to maintaining popular resolve in the defense of freedom. Then, as today, those who deny that there is a real and threatening enemy accuse the defenders of fearmongering. The question is whether, in fact, there is an enemy to be feared.

The beginning of the end of the Cold War—although the end was long delayed—began, says Gaddis, with Khrushchev’s address to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist party in 1956. There he denounced the cult of personality and the monstrosities perpetrated by Stalin. “I was obliged to tell the truth about the past,” he later recalled, “whatever the risks to me.” But the risks were not just to Khrushchev but also to the entire Soviet system. Gaddis writes: “The system he was trying to preserve had itself been based, since the time of Marx and Engels, on the claim to be error-free. That was what it meant to have discovered the engine that drives history forward. A movement based on science had little place for confession, contrition, and the possibility of redemption. The problem Khrushchev created for himself and for the international Communist movement, therefore, began almost from the moment he finished speaking.”

The Marxist ideology provided a rationale for the killing of at least a hundred million people, some say many more than that. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a sign went up on an East German factory: “To the workers of the world: I am sorry.” As Gaddis wryly notes, “There hardly needed to be a signature.”

June 2, 1979

Gaddis gives all the major players—such as Thatcher, Gorbachev, Havel, Reagan, John Paul II, Nixon, Kissinger—a fair and dispassionate assessment in their part in ending the Cold War. (Kissinger does not come off well.) As he was preparing to run for president, Ronald Reagan offered his view of the much-vaunted policy of détente: “Isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey—until Thanksgiving Day?” His background in the movies led many people to underestimate Reagan, says Gaddis, “for Reagan was as skillful a politician as the nation had seen for many years, and one of its sharpest grand strategists ever. His strength lay in his ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity. And what he saw was simply this: that because détente perpetuated—and had been meant to perpetuate—the Cold War, only killing détente could end the Cold War.” Although it was then condemned as recklessly simplistic, few today would dissent from Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

Gaddis gives a starring role, if not the starring role, in the ending of the Cold War to John Paul II, although his account might have benefited by drawing on George Weigel’s The Final Revolution and Witness to Hope. Gaddis writes, “When John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland—and ultimately everywhere else in Europe—would come to an end.” Stalin’s jibe about the pope having no divisions was soon to receive its definitive answer. As the Cold War was rooted in a conflict of ideologies and visions, so it was a drama unfolding in narrative form, and nobody could equal John Paul as a master of the dramatic arts.

In a chapter focusing on the chief actors in the end of communism, Gaddis employs three crucial epigraphs: John Paul’s “Be not afraid,” China’s Deng Xiaoping’s “Seek truth from facts,” and Mikhail Gorbachev’s “We can’t go on living like this.” A great deal was risked in the Cold War, and dangerously wrong judgments were made on all sides. But most readers will agree with the author’s judicious conclusion:

Still, for all of this and a great deal more, the Cold War could have been worse—much worse. It began with a return of fear and ended in a triumph of hope, an unusual trajectory for great historical upheavals. It could easily have been otherwise: the world spent the last half of the 20th century having its deepest anxieties not confirmed. The binoculars of a distant future will confirm this, for had the Cold War taken a different course there might have been no one left to look back through them. That is something. To echo the Abbé Sieyes when asked what he did during the French Revolution, most of us survived.

As I say, it will likely be a long time before we have another historical account of this drama as well-informed, judicious, and readable as John Lewis Gaddis’ The Cold War. The success of U.S. policy, supported by our allies, was in largest part the work of those whom Secretary of State Dean Acheson described as being “present at the creation.” Especially in the immediate postwar years, they were the representatives of a clear-thinking, tough-minded liberalism that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once called, a long time ago, “the vital center.”

Today we are confronted by a different ideologi-cally driven enemy. Islamist jihadism is different also, in that, unlike Marxism, its cause is not susceptible to historical falsification. As Gaddis notes, Marxism was a quasi-religious faith in a “scientific” explanation of history. Beginning with Khrushchev’s 1956 speech, it suffered blow after blow, and the presumably infallible explanation was finally shattered by the history it claimed to explain. The jihadists, instead, are sustained by faith in the will of God by which their victory may be long delayed—they speak of a war of two hundred years—but is absolutely certain. In resisting them, geopolitical “containment” along the lines of George Kennan’s answer to communism will not work because they are not limited by geography or nation states. Religious-ideological conversion seems improbable.

Of course, American leaders, too, invoke the will of God and declare their faith in the ultimate triumph of freedom. There is no moral symmetry here, however. The cause of freedom, democracy, peace, and development is posited against a brutally aggressive war declared by the jihadists. Whether or not he invokes God explicitly, in opposing that aggression, no morally sane person engages in a conflict without believing, or at least hoping, that he is on the side of a transcendent justice. After all the nuances and complexities are given their due, it really does come down to choosing sides.

In the situation after the attacks of September 11, 2001, some say we are engaged in World War IV, referring to the Cold War as World War III. Many Americans seem to be uncertain about whether we are at war at all. They will be momentarily awakened by the next attack, and may be wide awake if they are not among the victims of a nuclear or biochemical attack in a major metropolitan area. Meanwhile, however, they are vaguely aware of a threatening presence—both external and internal—that they would much prefer to be handled by diplomacy and police action. Talk about war strikes them as disquietingly overheated.

And if it really is war, they would much prefer that it be led by almost anybody other than the current administration. This is the theme developed in Peter Beinart’s recent book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Beinart is the former editor of the New Republic and he deplores what has happened to liberalism at the hands of the Democratic party. The McGovern revolution of 1972 continues today, he believes, in holding liberalism hostage to the leftist escapism of Michael Moore, Howard Dean, and John Kerry, for example.

The philosophical hero of The Good Fight is the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who in the aftermath of World War II rallied liberals to a “moral realism” in defending the free world (without sneer quotes) against communism. The problem is that there are today few liberals of that type to rally. And even fewer with any influence in the Democratic party. Witness the isolation of Senator Joseph Lieberman for his support of the war on terror. Niebuhrian liberals are today the former Democrats or nominal Democrats who are commonly called neoconservatives.

In his animus against President Bush and his administration, Beinart neglects an elementary truth that Niebuhr well understood: In the real world of conflicting powers and ambitions, we do not often, or even usually, get to select our enemies and allies. As an enemy, terrorism is more amorphous than were the Soviet Union and Mao’s China during the Cold War, but the enemy is no less real. One may wish Beinart well in his effort to recall liberalism to a Niebuhrian appreciation of the present danger. It does not seem natural that one party should have a near-monopoly on the allegiance of the grown-ups.

The McGovern revolution, however, has not yet run its course. If anything, the intensity of partisan anger against the person and policies of the president seems to grow and grow. To speak of “our president” or of “our foreign policy” or even of “our troops” is to invite outraged reaction. What Peter Beinart knows and yet, perhaps admirably, refuses to accept is that many of those whom he is trying to persuade have somewhere along the way decided that this is not their country. Which is not to say that they are not patriotic, but they are patriots of another America—an America of their preference, an America at peace, an America without enemies.

John Lewis Gaddis tells the story of blindness, delusions, and blunders. But, in the main, it is the story of grown-ups who saw their duty and did it, and by the grace of God, they prevailed. Now we are engaged in another “long twilight struggle,” as John F. Kennedy called the Cold War. There have been and will be blindnesses, delusions, and blunders aplenty. Whether there will be another generation prepared to see its duty and do it is at this point an open question.