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COPYRIGHT 2001 JAI Press, Inc.
Operation Rollback: America's Secret War behind the Iron Curtain. By Peter Grose. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 256 pp. $25.00.)
Undermining the Kremlin: America Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 By Gregory Mitrovich. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. 235 pp. $34.95.)
Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. By Arch Puddington. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. 416 pp. $27.50.)
In the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy uttered the old chestnut to the effect that "victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." Historians of the Cold War, however, have often turned that notion on its head. Why the U.S. victory in the Gold War has largely been orphaned by the history establishment is perhaps traceable to the sudden and unexpected denouement of the conflict, but is more likely due to the hostility, since the late 1960s, of most intellectuals toward the Cold War. Arch Puddington, vice president for research at Freedom House and author of one of the books under review, recently made the same point: "It is by now clear that an amendment must be added to the adage that history is written by the winners. It would read: 'Except for the Cold War.'" [1]
To be sure, some leading historians have begun to offer a more dispassionate assessment of the Cold War, as did John Lewis Gaddis, for example, in We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. [2] Yet revisionist works disparaging the West's efforts to resist Soviet aggression and influence continue to appear, as demonstrated by Frances Stonor Saunders's new book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. [3] Saunders resurrects the story, first revealed in the late 1960s, of covert CIA support for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a clearinghouse for the literary and cultural activities of anticommunist intellectuals in the West, and a counterweight to the agitprop fomented by Cominform, which was created by Stalin in 1946 to disrupt the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. The Grose and Mitrovich volumes reflect these old and new views, respectively, on the Cold War and for that reason are the most interesting. Both are based on recently declassified materials and cover the period roughly between 1946 and 1956 during which a bold policy of "rolling back" Soviet power was conceived and launched. Spanning the longer period of 1949-91, Puddington's work is a more conventional and balanced history, a heavily documented examination of perhaps the most successful, yet controversial, Cold War agencies, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), for which he once worked.
The Cold War was a new type of conflict--total, but somewhere between peace and war--and encompassed all imaginable forms of national competition, from the "kitchen debate" to the Cuban missile crisis, from cultural exchanges to commando raids. It also demanded a new approach to international relations. By the 1960s, the Englishman who "wrote the book" on traditional. diplomacy came to appreciate that the old rules no longer applied. "Compared to the present struggle between West and East," wrote Sir Harold Nicolson in an epilogue he added to his 1939 classic, Diplomacy, "the rivalries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sink into insignificance. Today we are faced, not with a clash of interests, but with a fight between ideologies, between the desire on the one hand to defend individual liberties and the resolve on the other hand to impose a mass religion. In the process the old standards, conventions, and methods have been discredited." [4]
New methods, however, would have to give practical application to concepts of competition, such as nonmilitary conflict and ideological hostilities, that remain difficult to define. Since most Western security and intelligence operatives at the dawn of the Cold War were veterans of the Second World War, and in particular veterans of the Office of War Information and Office of Strategic Services, it was perhaps inevitable that they would try to deploy against the Soviet Union some of the tools that had been helpful in the fight against Nazi Germany. Behind the Iron Curtain, this meant propaganda (both "white" and "black"), economic warfare, sabotage, demolition, and assistance to underground resistance movements. In the West, it included aid to refugee organizations and like-minded cultural and political activists such as those associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Too strong for traditional diplomacy and too weak for conventional warfare, this mix of tactics forms the foundation on which judgmen ts continue to be made about U.S. Cold War policies.
Grose and Mitrovich throw fresh light on this subject by revealing just how wrong conventional wisdom has been regarding the Soviet policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. According to that textbook account, the Truman administration pursued...
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