Yale historian Gaddis’ latest cold war history is just out - reviewed in the NYT Review of Books.
IN 1991, as the Soviet Union was cracking up, one of President George H. W. Bush’s senior foreign policy officials told me, “You historians are going to have a hard time explaining to the Americans of the future why we thought the cold war was so dangerous for 45 years.” He was right. By 2006, Americans too young to have lived through the era of duck-and-cover drills require a scholar of extraordinary gifts to tell why nine cold-war presidents deployed our national treasure against an empire that broke apart so clumsily in the end.
John Lewis Gaddis is that scholar, and “The Cold War: A New History” is the book they should read. A professor of history at Yale, Gaddis is the author of six renowned volumes on the cold war - especially the strategies of both sides - that were written during or shortly after the struggle.
No one did a better job of trying to explain the conflict as it was still unfolding, which for a historian is like trying to describe an entire forest while racing through it on horseback at midnight. But with this succinct and self-assured book, Gaddis now enjoys the luxury of hovering high above the trees in gleaming sunlight, using the once-secret information and hindsight that a scholar needs to write true history.
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