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Abstract
This article examines the main centres for the study of the Cold War in the United States, the key repositories of relevant documents, and the main publication outlets and conferences on the Cold War. It also describes the principal texts and approaches to teaching the Cold War and portrays the essential scholarly, public and political debates on the Cold War. The article concludes with a study of the contending and increasingly politicized views of the lessons of the Cold War and the relevance of the Cold War to our world today.
Notes
Hope M. Harrison is the director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where she is also an associate professor of history and international affairs. She coordinates the George Washington University Cold War Group. Her first book is Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, 2003). She is currently working on a second book project examining the intersection of politics, history and memory concerning the Berlin Wall, 1989–2009.
[1] Quoted in LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 366.
[2] Quoted in CitationLeDuff and Broder, ‘First a Private Farewell, Then a Public Outpouring’.
[3] , ‘The End of History?’ and The End of History and the Last Man.
[4] The quote is from Alexander Haig, cited in CitationDowd, ‘Epitaph and Epigone’. See also CitationHoffman, ‘Hastening an End to the Cold War’; CitationWill, ‘An Optimist's Legacy’; CitationStanley, ‘Once Again, Reagan Lands the Big Television Moment’.
[5] President Reagan's speech in Berlin, 12 June 1987, can be found at http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/wall.asp.
[6] CitationShales, ‘Sorrow, Via Satellite’. See also CitationApplebaum, ‘How the Pope “Defeated Communism”’; and CitationBernstein, ‘Did John Paul Help Win the Cold War?’
[7] CitationNagourney, ‘Reagan Legacy Looming Large Over Campaign’; Dowd, ‘Epitaph and Epigone’; CitationVandeHei, ‘Freedom, Culture of Life United Bush and Pope’. On the other side of the globe two years later, in a similar effort to don the mantel of his predecessor, Russian President Vladimir Putin did all he could when his predecessor Boris Yeltsin died to show that he was following in (the good parts of) Yeltsin's footsteps. CitationFinn, ‘Kinder View of Yeltsin Emerges in Eulogies’.
[8] Gaddis, The Cold War, 265.
[9] Gaddis, We Now Know, 291.
[10] Hounshell used to run Carnegie Mellon's Cold War Science and Technology Program until they ended the programme in 2001. The website remains: http://www.cmu.edu/coldwar.
[11] See also CitationGriffith, ‘Un-Tangling the Web of Cold War Studies’.
[12] CitationGaddis, The Cold War, ix.
[13] Leading the orthodox school were Herbert CitationFeis with his book, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and CitationThomas A. Bailey with his book, America Faces Russia. Leading the revisionist school were with his books, American–Russian Relations and The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and CitationGar Alperovitz with his book, Atomic Diplomacy. Leading the post-revisionist school was with his book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War and then his article, ‘The Emerging Post-Revisionist Thesis on the Origins of the Cold War’. For a good, succinct summary of the historiography during and since the end of the Cold War, see CitationCox's review of Leffler's book, A Preponderance of Power. For a more expansive account of the historiography, see CitationWestad, Reviewing the Cold War.
[14] Of the 40 syllabi this author consulted for this article, roughly ten assigned Gaddis and ten assigned LaFeber, sometimes both together.
[15] LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1.
[16] Gaddis, The Cold War, xi.
[17] LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 20–22. Although LaFeber does not mention Gaddis by name, it seems clear that he is also referring to Gaddis' assessment of Stalin as ‘psychologically disturbed’, as evidenced by killing his parrot, and by shooting or compelling his wife to shoot herself. Gaddis, ‘The Tragedy of Cold War History’. For Zubok and Pleshakov's analysis of Stalin and the origins of the Cold War, see Inside the Kremlin's Cold War.
[18] LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 65, 76–78.
[19] LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1, 177.
[20] LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 299, 303, 313.
[21] LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 338–399. See also Evangelista, Unarmed Forces, esp. Chs. 11–14.
[22] CitationGaddis' main contribution on the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War is his The Long Peace. See also Gaddis et al., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb.
[23] One of the few works on economic aspects of the war is Zhang, Economic Cold War.
[24] Gaddis, The Cold War, x.
[25] Gaddis, We Now Know, 13–25; and The Cold War, 10–14, 94, 99–101, 104.
[26] For a thorough critique of Gaddis on this point, see CitationLeffler's review of We Now Know.
[27] For a thorough critique of Gaddis on this point See also reviews of We Now Know by Michael S. Sherry; and by Carolyn CitationEisenberg. For reviews of The Cold War, see CitationPainter, ‘A Partial History of the Cold War’, and CitationLundestad, ‘The Cold War According to John Lewis Gaddis’, as well as Gaddis' ‘Response to Painter and Lundestad’.
[28] See We Now Know, 134, 143–151; and The Cold War, Ch. 4, 119–155.
[29] CitationSmith, ‘New Bottles for New Wine’. See also Leffler, ‘Inside Enemy Archives’.
[30] See CitationLundestad, ‘Empire by Invitation?’
[31] Gaddis, We Now Know, Chs. 2, 3, 7, and 10 and The Cold War, Ch. 3, ‘Command vs. Spontaneity’, and pp. 263–266 of the Epilogue.
[32] Reynolds, One World Divisible, 3.
[33] Reynolds, One World Divisible, 4.
[34] Reynolds, One World Divisible, 36.
[35] Reynolds, One World Divisible, 545–547.
[36] Hanhimaki and Westad, The Cold War, ix.
[37] CitationJensen, The Origins of the Cold War.
[38] Kennan published a version of this, his ‘X’ article, ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’; and Novikov's telegram of 27 September 1947 was published in Diplomatic History, Vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 527–537.
[39] There are many movies on Cold War related subjects, some of which are regularly shown in classes – in addition to the very popular CNN Cold War documentary series of which many professors show excerpts or whole films in their classes. Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is the most popular movie shown in classes on the Cold War, followed by The Manchurian Candidate and Thirteen Days. Other movies on Cold War themes include (in no particular order): North by Northwest; the ‘Rocky’ and ‘Rambo’ movies; The King and I; Hearts and Minds; The Fog of War; The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; The Russia House; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Goldfinger; Funeral in Berlin; Eins, Zwei, Drei (One, Two, Three); A Foreign Affair; The Day of the Jackal; Three Days of the Condor; The Hunt for Red October; China Gate; Atomic Café; Man of Marble; The Tunnel; Goodbye, Lenin! and The Lives of Others.
[40] Both historians and political scientists have engaged in a passionate debate about what caused the end of the Cold War. See, for example, CitationDuedney and Ikenberry, ‘Who Won the Cold War?’; CitationPipes, ‘Misinterpreting the Cold War’; Kegley, ‘How Did the Cold War Die?’; and the symposium in Diplomatic History 16, no. 1–2 (Winter and Spring 1992).
[41] See, for example, the Special Issue of Journal of Cold War Studies with seven articles devoted to ‘Ideas, International Relations, and the End of the Cold War’, 7, no. 2 (Spring 2005). See also CitationCox, ‘Another Transatlantic Split?’
[42] LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 406, 420.
[43] Westad, Global Cold War, 404.
[44] See CitationColl, Ghost Wars; CitationJohnson, Blowback; LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 416.
[45] See the Iran Documentation Project on the National Security Archive website: http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/iran/index.htm.
[46] For comparisons between the Cold War and the war on terror, see McFaul, ‘To Fight a New “ism”’; Keller, ‘The 40-Year War’; defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's interview with Charles Gibson on ABC's ‘Good Morning America’ (8 October 2001, 7 a.m.); Rumsfeld's interview with Tony Snow on ‘Fox New Live’ (8 October 2001, 7:30 a.m.); Rumsfeld's Pentagon news briefing with chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers (8 October 2001, 1 p.m.); and CitationDaalder and Lindsay, ‘Nasty, Brutish, and Long’.
[47] Condoleezza Rice on the Lehrer News Hour, 25 September 2002.
[48] Bush's speech on Iraq, televised from Cincinnati, 7 October 2002.
[49] CitationSullivan, ‘JFK Aides Say Bush is Wrong on Crisis’; CitationPurdum, ‘The Missiles of 1962 Haunt the Iraq Debate’; CitationMorley, ‘A Precedent That Proves neither Side's Point’.
[50] President Bush's speech on the future of Iraq, 26 February 2003, Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, DC, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/print/20030226-11.html. On the differences between the earlier occupations and the occupation of Iraq, see CitationSerafino, ‘U.S. Occupation of Iraq?’ On the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2005, President Bush also referred to the success of the US role in Western Europe after World War II, contrasting the experience of Eastern Europe and the Baltics which were occupied by the Red Army. CitationBumiller, ‘Bush's Letter to Baltics’.
[51] See for example, CitationDallek, ‘Iraq Isn't Like Vietnam’; CitationGraham, ‘Is Iraq Another Vietnam Quagmire?’; CitationKrugman, ‘The Vietnam Analogy’; CitationMueller, ‘The Iraq Syndrome’. For another view on a comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, see CitationLaird, ‘Iraq’. Some critics also say that Iraq could be our Soviet Afghanistan, see Kaufman, ‘Will We look Like the Soviets When We Leave Iraq?’
[52] Tyson, ‘Gates, U.S. General Back Long Iraq Stay’; and CitationSanger, ‘With Korea as Model, Bush Team Ponders Long Support Role in Iraq’.
[53] CitationMeyerson, ‘The Korean Analogy’.
[54] See, for example, Rice, ‘Remarks’.
[55] CitationRice ‘Roundtable with the Press’.
[56] Rice, speech.
[57] ‘Opening Remarks’. See also King, ‘How Rice Uses History Lessons’; and CitationChollet, ‘Altered State’.
[58] For a revisionist view of the way Truman's policies exacerbated the Cold War, see Offner, Another Such Victory.
[59] ‘Remarks with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer at the Ronald Reagan Library’, Simi Valley, California, 23 May 2007, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2007/may/85446.htm.
[60] See the preface of CitationRice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, ix.
[61] Kessler, ‘Rice, Putin Trade Cold War Words’; CitationLavrov, ‘One Cold War Was Enough’.
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