The Cold War; A New History

New York: The Penguin Press, 2005. Third printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Very good. Jeffrey L. Ward (Interior maps).. xii, [6], 333, [1] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Substantial highlighting and ink marks and comments noted. (primarily up to page 80). Evaluates the second half of the twentieth century in light of its first fifty years, chronicling how the world transformed from a dark era of international communism and nuclear weapons to a time of political and economic freedom. John Lewis Gaddis (born 1941) is an American international relations scholar, military historian, and writer. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy, and he has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life, his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His most famous work is the highly influential Strategies of Containment, which analyzes in detail the theory and practice of containment that was employed against the Soviet Union by Cold War American presidents; his 1983 distillation of post-revisionist scholarship similarly became a major channel for guiding subsequent Cold War research. The Cold War, praised by John Ikenberry as a "beautifully written panoramic view of the Cold War, full of illuminations and shrewd judgments," was an examination of the history and effects of the Cold War than had been previously possible, and won Gaddis the 2006 Harry S. Truman Book Prize. Derived from a Kirkus review: Cold War scholar Gaddis fashions a comprehensive account of what JFK called our "long twilight struggle." Following the defeat of the Axis powers in WWII, the western democracies faced off against their former ally, the totalitarian Soviet Union, in a global contest to determine the shape of the future. Each side's nuclear arsenal made total war unthinkable, but neither could afford to back down. Gaddis condenses this sprawling story for a new generation of readers. He resuscitates such almost-forgotten acronyms as SALT, START, SEATO, NATO and MAD, and he places the wars in Korea and Vietnam within the context of the larger struggle and reminds us how lesser tussles over the Chinese offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu, the African nation of Angola, Cuba's Bay of Pigs and Afghanistan before al-Qaeda also affected superpower relations. He discusses the impact of the Berlin Wall, the Cultural Revolution and the Marshall Plan, as well as the Berlin airlift, the Cuban missile crisis, the downing of Gary Powers's U-2 spy plane, Solidarity's Gdansk shipyard strike and Nixon's trip to China. The Cold War's surprisingly peaceful outcome was by no means assured. The democracies forged many an unseemly compromise, suffering frequent setbacks and not a few outright defeats before prevailing. In the end, however, as Gaddis demonstrates, Marxism, which failed to ensure economic success even as it stifled political and social justice, proved no match for the vision of George Kennan or the stirring rhetoric of Kennedy and Reagan in Berlin, Churchill at Westminster College and John Paul II in Krakow. A superb introduction to a complex period in world history.