January 23, 2006
The Cold War Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:30 PM EST For us early baby boomers (actually, I was born two years prior to the official start of the baby boom, but who’s counting?), the Cold War was the daily news. We grew up with it, day by day. I’m too young to remember the Berlin Airlift, but I do recall, at age five, driving somewhere at night with my father and hearing over the radio that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. The Korean War and the death of Stalin were part of my childhood; the Berlin Wall and Fidel Castro part of my adolescence. With the rest of the country, the denizens of my college dorm—usually concerned with football games, girls, beer, and now and then academics—sat in front of a television set and listened to President Kennedy tell us—and the Soviets—that “any missile launched from Cuba against any country in the Western Hemisphere will be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union against the territory of the United States, calling for a full retaliatory response.” It was as deeply frightening a moment as I have ever experienced. Obviously it frightened a lot of other people with a lot more power than a college freshman, and the Cold War became a little less scary after that, with “the hot line” and other means to defuse a crisis. “Detente,” a French word meaning relaxation or easing, came to denominate the post-Cuban Missile Crisis phase of the Cold War. But even into my adulthood, the contest between the West and the East, between democratic capitalism and totalitarian socialism, between us and them, dominated the international news. Then, in a geopolitical eye-blink, it was over. Eastern Europe was free, and even the Soviet Union—the world’s last empire—ceased to exist. The red hammer and sickle came down from atop the Kremlin and the old Russian tricolor rose up the mast. It was December 25, 1991. I was 47 years old. Journalism has often been called the first draft of history. It’s a neat little metaphor, but not really accurate, for journalists deal with trees and historians deal with forests. And now, 15 years down the road, The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin Press, $27.95), gives us a splendid look at the dark and dangerous forest through which so many of us traveled. More an extended essay than a narrative history, the book is short (less than 300 pages), highly accessible, well written, and illuminating. Gaddis points out that underlying detente was the idea that the division of the world into two highly armed camps was a permanent fixture of global politics, something with which we simply had to deal. But a new set of leaders who arose in the late 1970s, such as Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, did not accept the permanence of the Cold War. The Soviets were deeply alarmed. “How could you possibly allow the election of a citizen of a socialist country as pope?” Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, demanded of his Warsaw bureau chief, apparently unaware that, wide as the KGB’s influence was, it did not extend to the Sistine Chapel. He was right to be alarmed, for John Paul would turn out to be the most historically significant pope since the Middle Ages. But it was when Ronald Reagan became President, in 1981, that the dynamic of the Cold War began to change fundamentally. For a card-carrying member of the academic elite (he is Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale), Gaddis is surprisingly ready to give credit where credit is due. He says of Reagan that his fame as a film star “caused his opponents—sometimes even his friends—to underestimate him, a serious mistake, for Reagan was as skillful a politician as the nation had seen for many years, and one of its sharpest grand strategists ever.” He is less complimentary of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaddis readily concedes that by allowing events in Eastern Europe in 1989 to unfold without military intervention, saving untold lives, Gorbachev was “the most deserving recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize.” But he thinks Gorbachev was never a leader in the class with Reagan, Thatcher, and Vaclav Havel, for while they all had clear geopolitical destinations and maps to get there, Gorbachev “dithered in contradictions without resolving them.” Far more aware of the disastrous internal realities of the Soviet empire than were Western experts and intelligence services, he realized that profound change was necessary if the Soviet Union was to survive. But he never developed a means of managing that change and thus was overwhelmed by events. Historians will be writing about the Cold War for the foreseeable future, but few of them will be able to do so without consulting John Lewis Gaddis’s instructive and enlightening book.
January 18, 2006
Paranoia Strikes Deep Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:00 AM EST The January 7 issue of The Economist contains a column titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” with a subhead reading, “It’s back, updated for a new generation.” The reference, of course, is to Richard Hofstadter’s penetrating analysis of American political discourse through the ages, which he delivered in lecture form in 1963 and then published as a magazine article in 1964 and a book the following year. A copy of Hofstadter’s article can be found here. Hofstadter makes his political views clear at the start: “In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.” Yet while his lumping together of Alger Hiss with such innocent targets of McCarthyism as FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower sounds quaint today, other remarks in Hofstadter’s article have remained timely: “Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.” Using the broad sweep that distinguishes all his writing, Hofstadter finds examples of the paranoid style in many eras: “In the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.” The Economist column suggests that nowadays the paranoid style is chiefly exhibited by the left, and to be sure, elements of it can be found there. Anyone who saw Samuel Alito raked over the coals last week for his membership in a college alumni group must have been reminded of the worse excesses of anti-Communism, though in this case the episode was much closer to farce than tragedy. Yet it’s not just the left; today’s American right also has plenty of members peddling tales of cabals and shadowy manipulation and nefarious foreign influence. Which raises the question: Is The Economist subhead correct to say that the paranoid style is “back”? Has it ever been absent from American politics? In his article Hofstadter makes tentative efforts to link the paranoid style to a sense of feeling “dispossessed.” That’s probably true, but it approaches being too vague to be useful. At any given time, just about everyone can generate some sort of grievance and can look back to some sort of golden age that has been destroyed. The wealthy and powerful are no less resistant to the paranoid style than anyone else. The paranoid style has been a constant presence in American politics because it works. It’s easier to label your opponents as dupes or traitors than to engage them on the merits, and when you assume the existence of a fiendish plot, any contrary evidence can be written off as disinformation—it’s all part of the conspiracy. Paranoid-style tactics may assume greater or lesser prominence according to how well they fit the issues of the day, but if the current level is, say, 8 on a 10-point scale, I’d reckon the index has rarely dropped below 5. Like it or not, the paranoid style is an unavoidable feature of democracy—though we can take a grim sort of comfort in observing that totalitarian regimes seem even more fond of it.
January 17, 2006
Benjamin Franklin’s Birthday Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST It is perhaps fortunate that time machines exist only in the fertile imaginations of such men as H. G. Wells. For the past is truly a foreign country and the people who lived in it would be strangers to us indeed. There was a now long-forgotten play in the 1930s called, if I remember correctly, Berkeley Square in which the modern protagonist finds himself in eighteenth-century London. Seeing a set of magnificent Chippendale chairs in a dining room, he compliments the hostess on them. Deeply offended by what she takes as sarcasm, she replies, “I’m afraid they are the best we can afford.” Just talking with people of the eighteenth century would be difficult. We would have less trouble understanding them, I imagine, than they us. Our language, after all, is filled with twentieth-century references, idioms, metaphors, and slang that would be meaningless to them (“Excuse me, but what does ‘Freudian’ mean?”). Such everyday twentieth-century artifacts as an automobile might be explicable (although they would marvel at the precision of its parts, how fast it could move, and, perhaps most of all, how little it cost relative to average annual income). But a computer or an iPod would be incomprehensible, thanks to J. B. S. Haldane’s law (“Any technology sufficiently advanced must appear as magic”). Still, few historians, I imagine, can resist the temptation to daydream now and then about going back to some lost world and meeting the long-dead great of that day. It’s a harmless enough way to pass an idle moment as one sits by the fire on a bitter cold winter night. I remember with great pleasure the 1950s television series, hosted by Walter Cronkite, called You Are There. Once a week Mr. Cronkite would take a television crew to some historical event, such as the decision of the Continental Congress to declare independence, and interview the major players about it. Like modern-day politicians, they were always only too happy to get “face time” on the air. (In reality, I suspect a man of the eighteenth century, confronted with one of the gigantic cameras of the early days of television, would have run in the opposite direction screaming “The Martians have landed! The Martians have landed!”) But there has seldom been a greater density of great men in a particular time and place than in the early days of this country, when the Founding Fathers were still alive. I wonder how I might have felt about them had I known them in life. I’m sure I would have been scared to death of the austere and deeply reserved George Washington. I suspect I would have disliked the self-absorbed Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton, so frenetically productive (the editor of his collected papers said that by the time he was getting near the end of the task he was rooting for Burr), would probably have worn me out in short order. Benjamin Franklin, however, I’m sure I would have never tired of. Unlike most of the Founding Fathers, he was born into a modest home and had to make his own way in the world (which he did—he died very rich). This gave him a hands-on experience with the world of commerce that most of the others (except Hamilton) lacked. But while making his fortune in the printing business, and conjuring up numerous inventions with very practical applications, such as the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses, and the lightning rod, his endlessly restless and creative mind explored the cutting edge of science, most famously in the then utterly mysterious phenomenon of electricity. He was the first American to be quite as famous in Europe as he was in the colonies. Indeed, he had outgrown provincial Philadelphia by the 1750s and spent almost all of the next 20 years in London, where he hobnobbed with the great of the day on equal terms. Witty to a fault, he was a brilliant conversationalist on matters from the latest society tittle-tattle to the deepest questions of politics, science, and philosophy. He fills pages of any book of quotations with observations and reflections great and small (“Time is money,” “Nothing is certain but death and taxes,” “Snug as a bug in a rug”). My favorite Franklin quote, and perhaps the main reason for my utter disdain of any and all conspiracy theories, is “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” I will, of course, never meet Benjamin Franklin, except through his biographers, of which he has hundreds. My favorite modern biography is H. W. Brands’s The First American, but for heaven’s sake don’t miss Franklin’s autobiography (although, like all memoirs, it falls now and then into factual error). Since it’s only a fantasy, I can ignore the practical difficulties of talking with a man who lived in a world so different from mine. I know I would have deeply enjoyed having dinner with him and his friends, passing an evening with him, while a fire crackled in the fireplace and bottles of port were passed around. Tonight would be a good cold winter’s night for such a dinner, in fact, for it would allow me to raise my glass and say, “Happy 300th birthday, Dr. Franklin, and may you have many more to come.”
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