Worth the Cost

Derek Leebaert. The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory. Little, Brown and Company. 768 pages. $29.95 On all great subjects,’ says Mr. Mill, ‘much remains to be said’ and of none is this more true than of the English Constitution.” So Walter Bagehot opens his classic work on that great unwritten document. John Stuart Mill’s words can apply equally to another great subject, one which dominated our world for at least half of the twentieth century: the Cold War between Us and Them. It’s not that little has been said on this great subject. Just for the hell of it, I brought up that Kafkaesque internet search engine, Google, entered “Cold War” in the empty box, and in 0.09 seconds it reported 1.29 million “hits” — books, magazine articles, bibliographies, archives on the Cold War. (In case you’re curious: 1.9 million “hits” for World War II, 843,000 for World War I.) And now we have another “hit”: a mammoth, encyclopedic work — there are more than 400 items in Derek Leebaert’s bibliography — on the Cold War and After. It is written entertainingly and with just the right cynical note about those mainstream historians who, since the Cold War ended on his watch, are trying to write President Reagan out of history. With the onset of the conflict, a school of Cold War historians arose determined to politicize the profession. And they have pretty much succeeded. Histories, like Leebaert’s, that proclaim U.S. victory in the Cold War are rare. The revisionist historians claim that “nobody” won the Cold War or else that the United States “lost” it — yes, lost it. In fact, the Cold War’s end created a unique dilemma among academic intellectuals. Everybody knows who won World Wars I and II. We all know who lost the war in Vietnam. We all know the war in Korea ended in stalemate (but at least South Korea still exists). And we know who won the Franco-Prussian War. We have never in recent times had a problem deciding who won a war — that is, not until the Cold War. George Kennan, for example, announced in his memoirs published a few years ago, “Nobody ‘won’ the Cold War. It was a long and costly political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions and strength of the other side.” Yet in 1969 he said, “The retraction of Soviet power from its present bloated and unhealthy limits is essential to the stability of world relationships.” Kennan made this earlier statement when he was, as Leebaert describes him, “a ferocious Cold Warrior.” Here it is some three decades later: There is no Soviet power; its “bloated and unhealthy limits” have been retracted. There isn’t even a Soviet Union. So then didn’t the democracies win the Cold War? Didn’t the once Soviet-satellitized countries of Central Europe and their Velvet Revolutions “win” the Cold War? When President Reagan in 1987 called on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and the Berlin Wall came down November 9, 1989 — the annus mirabilis — without bloodshed, followed by German reunification, wasn’t that victory? Apparently not for Kennan. Or for the University of Southern California’s Ronald Steel, who offers this grudging verdict on freedom’s bloodless victory over Soviet totalitarianism: “We have won a victory, of sorts.” Of sorts! Would Professor Steel describe our triumph over Nazism as “a victory, of sorts”? Well, maybe we did win the Cold War, he writes, “yet this is an ambiguous victory.” But what is ambiguous about it? The onetime “evil empire,” as President Reagan called it to jeers from the liberal-left, is no more; democracy is alive where once dictators reigned. Where’s the ambiguity? There is even regret that the Cold War is over. Steel writes, “In its perverted way, the Cold War was a force for stability.” Indeed. Uprisings in East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; trampling of human rights; Afghanistan; Soviet support for the Yom Kippur war against Israel; the kgb everywhere; the Cuban missile crisis. Some force for stability. On the other hand, the Cold War was, he says, “dangerous, wasteful, obsessive, and at times irrational.” And then we have the words of our onetime president, Bill Clinton, who in a Washington Post interview (October 15, 1993) said, “We look back to that era now, and we long for a — I even made a crack the other day. I said, ‘Gosh, I miss the Cold War.’ It was a joke, I mean, I don’t really miss it, but you get the joke.” Fritz Stern, a distinguished Columbia historian, in a 1994 New York Times op-ed article derided claims that America won the Cold War. “Without the thousands of dissidents in the Soviet Union and those in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia who risked their lives to overthrow an ever-lying tyranny, we could not have prevailed and there would be no freedom in Eastern Europe,” he argued. The “final collapse of Soviet tyranny, unlike that of Nazism, was brought about by indigenous forces.” Professor Stern seemingly ignores postwar history. It was American leadership — Harry Truman’s, not “indigenous forces” — that organized the Berlin airlift in 1948 (when Britain’s Labour government was urging compromise with Stalin), that pressed the United Nations to resist the Communist invasion of South Korea, and that initiated the Marshall Plan. It was American leadership — Dwight Eisenhower’s — that strengthened nato and prodded hesitant allies in Western Europe to resist Communism. And it was American leadership — Ronald Reagan’s — that instituted an arms program, including sdi, which brought (as Russian commentators have now conceded) the ussr to its knees. Without the tough-minded “Reagan Doctrine,” the Soviet meltdown might have been a long time coming. Operation Rewrite about the Cold War, in full swing for more than four decades, has produced books like Losing Our Souls: The American Experience in the Cold War (Ivan R Dee, 1990) in which the author, the late historian Edward Pessen, argues that U.S. Cold War policy “was so grievously flawed that the United States may never fully recover from its effects upon our values, our freedoms, our politics, our security, the conditions of our material life, the quality of our productive plant, and the very air we breathe.” Or an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Wade Huntley, assistant professor of politics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, containing this hallucinatory sentence: “Considering what might have been, the United States was the loser in the cold war, not the winner.” Another academic work, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 1994), argues that the policy of deterrence prolonged the conflict. Among russian spokesmen, however, there is no question as to who won the Cold War and why. Vladimir Lukin, Boris Yeltsin’s foreign policy adviser, and Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, a onetime Russian foreign minister, both agree that the United States won the Cold War. Arkady Murashev, formerly Moscow’s police chief and a leader of democratic Russia, was quoted in the New York Review of Books (December 19, 1991) as saying about President Reagan, “He called us the ‘Evil Empire.’ So why did you in the West laugh at him? It’s true.” Andrei Kozyrev, Russia’s onetime foreign minister, told the Los Angeles Times (November 15, 1992) that “the Soviet Union had really been an evil empire.” He compared the “mass crimes” under the Soviet dictatorship to the revelations about the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. The son of Nikita Khrushchev, Sergio Khrushchev (who became a U.S. citizen several years ago), said on the Larry King Show, “Sure, you win [sic] the Cold War.” And there is the verdict of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “The Cold War was essentially won by Ronald Reagan when he embarked on the Star Wars program and the Soviet Union understood that it could not take this next step” (New Yorker, February 14, 1994). Of course, it is also luminously clear to the Baltic peoples and the peoples of Central Europe who won the Cold War. Probably the most atrocious distortion of Cold War history was the $15 million, 24-part television documentary produced in 1999 for cnn — under the direction of then-owner Ted Turner, the billionaire super-liberal of liberals — primarily directed at the nation’s schoolchildren. Its theme? America and the ussr had behaved like two equally demented gorillas threatening the world with a nuclear-tipped Armageddon. Leebaert rejects such a moral-equivalence approach, the notion that “the superpowers were each evil in their own ways.” As to the attacks against those Hollywood personalities who “named names,” would they have been attacked, asks Leebaert, had they been exposing American Nazi party members? The Turner film confirmed something the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter once said: “Selective information, if in itself correct, is an attempt to lie by speaking the truth.” The attacks blaming the United States for the Cold War began in the late 1960s and 1970s, led by revisionist historians like William Appleman Williams, D.F. Fleming, Gar Alperowitz, Diane Shaver Clemens, Lloyd C. Gardner, Gabriel Kolko, and, in an earlier incarnation, David Horowitz. But Robert James Maddox, in his The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 1973), effectively demolished this revisionist school. Maddox charged “that these books without exception are based upon pervasive misusages of the source materials.” I have gone into this elaborate detail to indicate the Sisyphean labor that Leebaert has undertaken laudably, especially his daring to indicate via subtitle that America had indeed achieved a “Cold War victory.” Where I fault the author is his dubious argument about the price the U.S. paid for this victory. What would have been the price of defeat? All victories have a price — as do all defeats — whether on the battlefield or in a legislature. And all military victories have in hindsight contained errors, huge errors even, but not sufficiently huge to have led to defeat. Should the American-led coalition have marched on Baghdad and, unworried about his successor, driven Saddam Hussein into a grave or exile? What a monumental error that was — or was it? Leebaert errs further when he writes that “[r]eaction against Communist penetration probably contributed to the decline of American labor unions.” And if the Communist unions had not been expelled from the cio? One might say that the decline would have been even greater. He adds that the expulsions “meant further delay in addressing racial discrimination, since the leftist unions had been leading the integration of American labor.” This finding will be news to the United Auto Workers; Walter Reuther, uaw’s onetime anti-Communist president, and other anti-Communist cio leaders were fighting for civil rights when the “leftist” unions, under Moscow direction, were opposing the civil rights fight because Stalin believed such a struggle could disrupt the war effort. Despite portentous and metaphysical language, Leebaert’s history has many virtues — even though there are times when, in an attempt to appease the unappeasable mainstream historians, he lapses into political correctness, to wit: “For the United States, the price of victory goes far beyond the dollars spent on warheads, foreign aid, soldiers, propaganda, and intelligence. It includes, for instance, time wasted, talent misdirected, secrecy imposed, and confidence impaired. . . . Trade was distorted and growth impeded. . . . Ultimately, the cost of America’s effort was felt as a waste of spirit.” Could not such a finding apply to the price of victory in World War II? Paragraphs like this one are strewn around The Fifty-Year Wound and they make the author’s conclusion, that the Cold War struggle was “worthwhile,” seem jejune. What the book lacks is a deep understanding of the meaning of the Cold War, an understanding best expressed by Diana Trilling when, in her essay on the J. Robert Oppenheimer affair, she wrote that “a staunch anti-Communism was the great moral-political imperative of our epoch.” It was a struggle against what Vaclav Havel, today president of the Czech Republic, called “the culture of the lie.” There is one blooper that ought to be caught in Professor Leebaert’s next edition. The author writes that Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness At Noon, was barred from entering the United States along with Yves Montand. I don’t know about the French actor but Koestler was not barred from this country. How do I know that? I was his personal assistant when he came to America in 1949 and delivered a lecture to a full house at Carnegie Hall, as a fundraiser for the International Rescue Committee, and then toured the country.