Deja Fu

Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Pages: 352
Year Published: 2005

As I stated in my review of Charlie Wilson’s War, the Cold War seems so long ago. And yet, it lasted for forty-six years, whereas it’s only been just over seventeen since it ended. In that time, an entire generation has grown never knowing what it was like to have the world divided between democracy and communism, between East and West, and between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is with that knowledge that John Lewis Gaddis produced this – a well-written, concise narrative which gives the reader a survey of the Cold War.

To his credit, Gaddis’ book isn’t just a straightforward, linear progression through history. While it naturally follows a progressive arc, from the origins in the end of the Second World War to the conclusion when Gorbachev needed to borrow a pen from a CNN correspondent to sign the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, but in between he examines not only governments and ideologies, but the leaders who crafted the policies and the people who sometimes overrode their leader’s wishes with their own.

Gaddis naturally hits all the highlights of the Cold War: the Berlin Airlift, NATO and the Warsaw Pact; the rise of Communist China, the Korean War, the Cuban Missle Crisis, Vietnam, etc., but he also provides insight into smaller, less-recognized events such as the 1953 East German Uprisings, Khrushchev’s visit to the United States (and subsequent inability to visit Disneyland), the Sino-Soviet split which enabled Nixon to open foreign relations with China and so on. He’s also not shy about both sides policies’ of supporting friendly governments who were anything but friendly with their own people. There’s even a remarkably objective critique of American foreign policy which had begun to take on amoral characteristics without condemning the policies themselves.

As a student of history, especially World War II, a lot of what’s presented here is repetition for me. (Gaddis himself even acknowledges there is no original scholarship in his book.) However, for someone who might have an interest, but never really took the time (or even for people for whom, as Gaddis puts it, the Cold War is as distant as the Peloponnesian War), The Cold War: A New History is a wonderful introduction to a singular event in human history where two great nations challenged each other for dominance, yet never actually fought a conflict with each other for it.

-K