We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Council on Foreign Relations Book) Book

The author of such acclaimed works as Strategies of Containment, The Long Peace, and The United States and the End of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis is one of America's leading historians of recent diplomatic history, perhaps our most astute commentator on foreign affairs since George Kennan. He has been hailed for his deep knowledge of the massive American archives, for his ability to blend engaging narrative with provocative analysis, and for his willingness to challenge comforting assumptions as he searches out the truth. Now comes his masterpiece, a monumental two-volume history of the Cold War, the first book of which is We Now Know.

Based on the latest findings of Cold War historians and extensive research in American archives as well as the recently opened archives in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China, We Now Know provides a vividly written, eye-opening account of the Cold War during the years from the end of World War II to the Cuban missile crisis. The book brims with new information drawn from previously unavailable sources, with fresh insight into the impact of ideology, economics, and nuclear weapons, and with striking reinterpretations of the roles of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Khrushchev, Mao, and Stalin. Indeed, Gaddis concludes that if there was one factor that made the Cold War unavoidable it was Stalin. He shows that while the Western democracies sought security as a collective good, Stalin's foreign policy was based on paranoia and cynicism, and security in his mind came only by intimidating or eliminating potential challengers. As Khrushchev bluntly put it, "No one inside the Soviet Union or out had Stalin's trust." Gaddis also sheds light Mao's changing relations with the Soviet Union, from his initial positive overtures to Stalin, to his disillusionment when Stalin was slow to provide promised military assistance to the Chinese, to the intense split of the 1950s and '60s (so great a schism that at one point Khrushchev's representatives discussed with the Americans a joint preventive military action against Chinese nuclear facilities). And throughout this compelling volume, Gaddis illuminates all of the major events of the era, describing, for instance, how Stalin gave Kim Il-sung the green light to invade South Korea and how Mao's Great Leap Forward produced the most devastating famine in modern history, killing an estimated 16 to 27 million people. The volume concludes with what one might have thought impossible--a fresh new look at the Cuban missile crisis, one that overturns much conventional wisdom. We discover that Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba because he saw more clearly than Kennedy that the Soviet Union was losing the Cold War; that Kennedy pushed for compromise during the crisis harder than any other member of his inner circle; that Castro urged Khrushchev to launch a nuclear attack; and that though Khrushchev backed down and pulled the missiles out of Cuba, he ultimately got the best of the bargain, winning a pledge from Kennedy not to invade Cuba, plus an undisclosed agreement to put U.S. missiles out of Turkey.

Here then is a far reaching and infinitely wise book. It is unquestionably one of the major works of diplomatic history--if not all history--to be published in this decade.