We Now Know

John Lewis Gaddis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press, 1997. 425 pg.

Writing a history of events while in the middle of them would be extremely difficult, and yet, previous Cold War scholars have had to do just that. One of the products of such work has been the various historiographical schools, which were developed during the fifty years of the Cold War. These schools, commonly known as Traditionalist, Revisionist, and Post-Revisionist, are now being reexamined because the Cold War has ended, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, making new sources available to scholars. One of the foremost scholars of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, has been significantly influenced by these new sources as is evident in what has become known as his definitive work on new Cold War Studies, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.

In this book, Gaddis sticks with four major themes in his analysis. First, the pinning of the origins of the Cold War upon the Russians and especially Joseph Stalin. The autocratic government that started under the rule of Lenin took on a new and odious flavor under the psychopathic and paranoid Stalin. His stamp on Soviet leadership was so potent that his influence continued long after he died. The second major theme of the book was that the Cold War was far less bi-polar than has originally been believed. Evidence now available to scholars, such as Gaddis, suggest that some of the Eastern Bloc nations did not necessarily “tow the Soviet line” monolithically. Gaddis's third theme is that the turning point in the Cold War was the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In his interesting analysis he shows that both national leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, did not desire nuclear conflict and could work for a state of peace. Finally, Gaddis focuses on the idea that there is much more material to research and that future works on the Cold War will, no doubt, bring even more interesting insight into the study of this 50-year period.

Certainly the most important figure of the entire 50-years was Joseph Stalin. Gaddis's introduction makes it abundantly clear the low opinion that he has of Stalin and his significant mark on the world. He makes the argument by use of social psychology, pinning the term dispositional behavior on Stalin while claiming that FDR was the opposite of dispositional -- a situational leader (Gaddis 20). He goes on to state without any subtly that Joseph Stalin started the Cold War after 1945 because ... it was Stalin's disposition to wage cold wars: he had done so in one form or another throughout his life, against members of his own family, against his closest advisors, against revolutionary comrades, against foreign communists, [and] even against returning Red Army war veterans... (Gaddis 22). This is a compelling argument which seems to be substantiated by the new evidence that Gaddis has acquired in doing his important research. Nevertheless, to lay the complete blame at the feet of Stalin because of his obvious dispositional behavior overlooks the intentional antagonism of the United States toward Communist revolution.

But this is not surprising coming from Gaddis. He has taken a primarily traditionalist view of the Cold War in this book and consistently makes the argument that the war was started by the Soviets based on ideology. This despite the fact that in a previous book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947, Gaddis argues a modified post-revisionist view that the origin of the Cold War was a series of miscommunications and misunderstanding of each other's (the United States and the USSR) goals (White 40). Gaddis's change of opinion is inculcated in the title of this book under review: We Now Know; his argument is that new evidence available now, given that the Cold War is over, has validated the traditionalist historiography. Whether or not this be the truth, it seems a bit of a stretch to conclude from all this that the Russians alone are culpable because of their ideology-- what about U.S. American ideology?

Of course the bi-polar nature of the traditional view of the Cold War can be nicely attributed to ideological differences and it has been customarily thought that the United States government (thanks to Kennan and other early policy makers) was engaged in a noble policy of containing a monolithic Communism bent on world domination. Nevertheless, the truth is much more prosaic than the U.S. American fantasies, according to Gaddis and his new evidence. Indeed, it appears that disagreements between the Soviets and Eastern Bloc nations started as early as the Marshall Plan period.

Many Eastern European countries were open to the aid offered through the Marshall Plan and attended the conference in Paris where it was unveiled by the United States with permission of Soviet leader Stalin. In fact, even after Stalin decided against participation in the program, the Czechs and Poles accepted the aid. Nevertheless, shortly after accepting, Czech and Pole leaders were summoned to Moscow and obliged to decline the aid based on Stalin's suspicions that the Americans were using the Marshall Plan to consolidate a Western Alliance hostile to the Soviet Union (Gaddis 42). Again, Gaddis seems to imply that it was Stalin's ideology which perpetuated the Cold War without giving the same weight to the fact that the Marshall Plan was an intentional move on the part of the of the U.S. Government “to gain control over Western Europe just as the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe” (Wikipedia “Marshall Plan Historiography”). Nevertheless, the end result of Stalin's insistence that Poland and Czechoslovakia abandon Marshall Plan negotiations was that these Eastern Bloc nations developed more slowly than their Western neighbors.

The largest and most obvious rupture of the idea of a “monolithic” Communism came from Soviet-Sino relations. Originally, according to Gaddis and others (including Gordon H. Chang), the Chinese Communists, and especially Mao Zedong, looked to the Soviets as their mentors for building the perfect Socialist state. Apparently, Mao even held-out Stalin to be “big brother,” while he fancied himself and his nation as “little brother.” Nevertheless, after the death of Stalin the relationship between the Soviets and the Chinese began to sour. In Gordon Chang's book this split between the Soviets and the Chinese is argued to be primarily the work of the CIA and a policy of separating and alienating the two Communist giants from one another (Chang 81). But Gaddis's treatment of this fall-out between the Soviets and the CCP focuses more on ideological differences between Mao Zedong and the emerging detente' championed by the successor to Stalin, Nikitia Khrushchev. While this analysis on the part of Gaddis seems to harken back to his more post-revisionist work done in The United States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947, it still poignantly ignores the ideology of the United States, focusing upon the ideological difference between China and the Soviet Union-- and how the Soviets came to their senses in dealing with the United States to the exclusion of their Communist, radical “little brother.”

Turning now to another radical, Fidel Castro in the Caribbean, the reader of We Now Know is given a thorough and interesting historiographical treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Gaddis seems to minimize the real threat of war that other scholars have pointed out. For instance, in the oral history work of James G. Blight it is pointed out that in the tumultuous, almost frenzied and varied reactions of President Kennedy's State Department and Cabinet, advice was being given to invade Cuba immediately after the discovery of the secret Soviet missiles (Postel). On the other hand, Gaddis gives a good deal of credit to Kennedy as a remarkable statesman who managed to avert nuclear disaster, even if there never was a real threat. In fact, one gets the impression that Gaddis thinks highly of President's careful maneuvering to a possible compromise with Soviets. According to Gaddis, the President formulated options that would save the world from a nuclear, or even a conventional war, by using masterful state craft in order to present a strong public profile against the missiles in Cuba while working behind the scenes, even around his own staff, to come to a solution which would resolve to peace.

The end result of the peaceful solution of the Missile Crisis, according to Gaddis, is that the boundary lines of the Cold War were drawn and a tense, “long peace” began (Gaddis 261). This “long peace” was centered in mutual threat; the Russo-American relationship from the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis became one of each side viewing their military power as more important than their respective non-military counterparts in waging the Cold War. Also, the Cold War competition took on a stability and predictability after 1962-- neither side wanting to initiate another direct armed confrontation. Additionally, on the other side of the world, Sino-Soviet relations already strained, were destroyed with the Crisis, marking an end to their formal alliance in 1962 as Mao Zedong criticized Khrushchev for “backing down.”

Gaddis, “backing down” from the position of ultimate Cold War historian, makes as a major theme of this book the idea that continued research is needed in the area of Cold War Studies. The deliberate choice of the title, We Now Know, explains the history of the Cold War in a new way which was unavailable to students of history in former generations. Gaddis, meticulously explains his choice of designation in the preface to the book. He does this by way of deconstruction of the three words in the title: We, Know, and Now.

“We” is used in the title to designate scholars of the Cold War era. For Lewis is now dealing with information that was not available to him or to any other scholar before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sources from many former Communist Bloc countries are being made available to these scholars and are being translated and incorporated into the historical record of the Cold War. By using the word “now” Gaddis does not mean to imply a timelessness to the knowledge that we have as a consequence of the Cold War being over. Instead, he intends to indicate that at the present moment we have a contingent amount of knowledge and perspective that was unavailable before hand. “Know” to the author is always subject to the information presently available coupled with the presuppositions that different scholars bring to the table. Gaddis leaves open the possibility that in that future scholars of the Cold War era will have even more insight than past or present scholars are privy to today.

In conclusion, “we” are privy today to a flood of new knowledge, as Gaddis has pointed out. His work is a remarkably good text for a “first look” at the history of the Cold War for the student. Nevertheless, this book is best read in the context of multiple studies on the subject given that Gaddis has developed a fundamental Traditionalist historiography. Without further and diverse reading, a student might become, inadvertently, a follower of the ethos of “triumphant capitalism and democracy,” which is so prevalent in U.S American politics on the right. This is not to say that Gaddis has been “rightist” in his treatment of the Cold War, but it is to say that he is more than likely, sincerely convinced that in the fifty years of ideological warfare that was the Cold War, the United States was finally vindicated as morally superior. To say the least, this is a troubling notion and worth further consideration before taking as dogma.

References
Chang, Gordon H. Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972. Standford University Press, CA. 1990.

Postel, Danny. “Revisiting the Brink.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 49, issue 8.

White, Timothy J. “Cold War Historiography: New Evidence Behind Traditional Typographies.” International Social Science Review, 2000. vol. 75, issue 3/4.