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    walter-shapiro

    Walter Shapiro

    Columnist

    Cold War Melt: The Biggest Event Since V-J Day

    Posted:
    11/9/09
    26 Comments  + 
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    The twentieth anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall is being treated in America as less emotionally resonant than the where-were-you-at-that-historic-moment memories of the chase of O.J. Simpson in his Ford Bronco. In truth, for all of us born between V-J Day and Ronald Reagan's second term – a swath of humanity that stretches from Bill Clinton to Beyoncé – the end of the Cold War was the most important global event of our lives.
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    As a baby boomer who grew up in the shadow of the Bomb, I know how much fears of the Soviet Union and nuclear war forged my worldview. A year before I was born, in early 1946, Winston Churchill ominously described the post-war fate of Eastern Europe: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." The American response was articulated by a Russian-speaking diplomat named George Kennan who wrote in 1947 that the strategy required a "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."
    As a child, I cowered under my desk during the mandatory duck-and-cover drills that, even as a 7-year-old, seemed paltry protection against Soviet nukes. I can picture my earnest liberal rabbi giving a sermon on the ethical dilemma of whether, after the apocalypse, you should turn away your unprepared neighbor from your backyard fallout shelter. In the most optimistic gesture of my life, I was fitted for contact lenses during the Cuban Missile Crisis when humanity's life expectancy hung in the balance. On the eve of "the whole world is watching" 1968 Democratic Convention, I remember the whole world watching in helpless fury when Soviet tanks turned the Prague spring into the jackboot summer. As a White House speechwriter in 1979, too junior to be evacuated to an undisclosed secure location, I boldly decided that in case of Soviet missile attack, I would spend my last minutes on the planet at the Godiva chocolate counter at a nearby department store.
    That anxious mindset vanished 20 years ago as revolution swept through East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria with barely a shot fired. There was widespread violence only in Romania where Nicholai Ceausescu tried to use the army to cling to power in December 1989. Two years later even Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union collapsed from internal corrosion and contradictions.
    In this nostalgia-draped culture – where moon walks and movie warriors are routinely commemorated – why are we treating the fall of the Berlin Wall like an obscure event in German history? Even on the home front in 1989, there were neither victory parades nor rapturous kisses in Times Square. (The lack of exuberance back then was partly explained by President George H.W. Bush's over-sensitive reluctance to embarrass Gorbachev). For all the stalemates and quagmires, for all the needless deaths in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, the collapse of the Evil Empire was a transcendent triumph equal to the signing of the 1945 surrender documents on the deck of the USS Missouri.
    The dawn of the Cold War coincided with the arrival of the television age as flickering picture tubes became the centerpiece of the nation's living rooms. But because American and Soviet troops never fought each other directly (aside from long secret fight pilot skirmishes during the Korean War) our visual imagery from that nuclear-armed four-decade struggle is curiously limited. For those too young to remember, the Cold War becomes over-simplified into a confusing highlights reel of a John Kennedy speech, black-and-white combat footage from Vietnam, a Technicolor Ronald Reagan standing at the Brandenburg Gate declaring, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" and finally rapturous young East Berliners dancing on the top that very wall on November 9, 1989.
    But what television cannot recapture is the fear that was a major chord in American life from the moment that the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb over the steppes of Kazakhstan on August 29, 1949. Popular culture offers some clues from end-of-mankind movies like On the Beach (1959) to over-wrought TV dramas like ABC's The Day After (1983) that depicted life, such as it was, in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack. War Games, a feature film that came out earlier that same year, depicted the hair-raising possibility of an inadvertent nuclear launch – unintended by human, that is. Accidental annihilation was a recurring Hollywood theme; not coincidentally, it was a fixation of America's only actor president, too. David Hoffman, a Washington Post reporter who covered the Reagan presidency reveals in a new book, Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, just how close this nightmare came to occurring.
    Anticipating this epic anniversary, I have buried myself in histories of the Cold War. Reading these books about a period that I remembered, it is chilling to realize how often policymakers in Washington – Democrats, Republicans and military leaders – contemplated using nuclear weapons in an immediate crisis. General Curtis LeMay, the head of the Strategic Air Command, gave a 1956 lecture at the National War College in which he cheerfully imagined the Soviet Union after it had been hit by the full weight of the American nuclear arsenal: "Dawn might break over a nation infinitely poorer than China – less populated than the United States and condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps for generations to come." Henry Kissinger, then a young lecturer at Harvard, published an influential 1957 article in Foreign Affairs that chillingly argued, "With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of it in terms of traditional warfare."
    In his engrossing new book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennen and the History of the Cold War, journalist Nicholas Thompson (Nitze's grandson) describes the internal Kennedy administration deliberations during the 1961 Berlin crisis. JFK presided over an October 1961 White House meeting that seriously debated whether a limited nuclear strike would inevitably lead to nuclear holocaust. As Nitze, a hawkish top Pentagon official, wrote in his meeting notes, "Do you think possible to use nukes without becoming gen[eral]. Would depend on the situation at the time." At the height of the brinksmanship during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara privately wondered if anyone in the White House would be alive to see the next day dawn. As Yale University's John Lewis Gaddis wrote in his 2005 book, The Cold War: A New History, the nuclear confrontation persuaded both Washington and Moscow "that the weapons that each side had developed during the Cold War posed a greater threat to both sides than the United States and the Soviet Union did to one another."
    Now that the Soviet archives have been examined by scholars and much American material from the early decades of the Cold War has been declassified, there are sobering and even frightening lessons in how often Washington and Moscow miscalculated. This is a major theme of former New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan's richly researched history of the 1950s nuclear rivalry, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon. Even though American policymakers were obsessed with stopping the vast Soviet armies from marching across Europe, Joseph Stalin and his successors never seriously contemplated this type of land war. As Sheehan writes about Stalin, "The people threatened by his paranoiac personality were the inhabitants of the Soviet Union and the population of the Eastern Europe lands he had placed within his baleful rule by the defeat of Germany, nor normally those beyond."
    Despite the white-knuckle fears of Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev's impulsive and destabilizing decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba was not an attempt to gain a first-strike nuclear advantage over America. Gaddis argues, "The Cuban missile crisis also shows how badly great powers can miscalculate when tensions are high and the stakes are great...Khrushchev intended his missile deployment chiefly an effort, improbable as it might seem, to spread revolution through Latin America." After he was ousted from power, Khrushchev said, "We had to establish a tangible and effective deterrent to American interference in the Caribbean. But what exactly? The logical answer was missiles."
    The point – and, pray God, this should be obvious – is not to depict the Soviet Union from Stalin to Leonid Brezhnev as a poor misunderstand nuclear-armed empire out to create a workers' paradise on earth. But in confronting Moscow for four decades, America continually took ill-considered risks (Douglas MacArthur racing for the Yalu River in Korea; Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam; the over-kill, over-reaction to the Soviet nuclear threat from Harry Truman to Reagan) because the most alarmist scenarios seemed most persuasive in White House briefing rooms. Long after Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate, otherwise rational American officials and politicians were governed by the shoot-first doctrine of "Better Dead Than Red."
    Equally worthy of retrospective ridicule are the left-wing apologists for the Soviet Union and the naive voyagers on Volga River friendship cruises. By the 1950s, almost all liberals understood the thuggish realities of the Soviet Empire. But too often (and, of course, there were exceptions) they adopted an attitude of defeatism towards human rights in Eastern Europe, fearing that dwelling on the agonies of the captive nations would only strengthen the hawks in Washington and derail arms-control negotiations. That is why Reagan's words at the Brandenburg Gate conveyed a moral clarity lacking amid the nuanced clauses of diplomatic rhetoric.
    That is not to claim that Reagan single-handedly won the Cold War or Gorbachev's surprising efforts to reform Communist lost it. Although some were more effective than others, every American president from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan adhered to Kennan's containment policy – originally dubbed the "Truman Doctrine" back when Reagan was still a Democrat (who had campaigned for Truman.) "Success has many fathers, and everyone has a favorite," British historian Timothy Garton Ash recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, and the obvious list also includes Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and Solidarity, the Hungarian reform Communists who had opened the border with Austria, as well as Reagan and Gorbachev. "I spent many hours standing in those crowds in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague," Ash recalls. "Their behavior was both inspiring and mysterious. What had moved these individual men and women to come out on the streets, especially when it was not self-evidently safe to do so?"
    After covering the Hungarian parliamentary elections in early 1990 – the first free elections in the former Soviet bloc in more than four decades – I returned from Budapest with a souvenir that is as evocative of this glorious triumph of democracy as a chunk of concrete and barbed wire from the Berlin Wall. Hanging in my office is an oversized campaign poster from the victorious right-wing Magyar Demokrata Forum that features a drawing of the back of a thick-necked, pimpled, green-clad Soviet solider. Superimposed on the poster are two Russian words that every Hungarian knew from years of Communist indoctrination that mean in translation: "Comrade – The End!"


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    Walter Shapiro

    Walter Shapiro, a PoliticsDaily.com columnist, has covered the last eight presidential campaigns as a columnist and political reporter... more

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