...John Lewis Gaddis Yale. Will future generations dismiss the Cold War as a squabble of indistinguishable ideologies and their state sponsors?

What did it all amount to?

Professor Gaddis's answer to the first question is Yes. To the second: No. To the third, he echoes Abbe Sieyes after the French Revolution: We survived. (He does not mean merely that we saved our skins. Free institutions survived.)

The Cold War began in fear--of apocalyptic war or totalitarian servitude. In 1949 George Orwell published his vision of our future in the totalitarian age: a boot stamping on a human face--forever. The age of individuality, law, creativity, clarity of language, truth in history, and even love, was passing. It was closing time in the gardens of the West. Big Brother was taking over, and the intellectuals as well as the populace welcomed his rule.

But the despair passed. The Cold War ended with an unexpected triumph of democratic hope. Not the hope of progress and happiness but of a pragmatic, prudent, sensible, dull but legitimate democracy. We still want a free society but we have lowered our sights.

Gaddis's Cold War tells this story from the fall of Berlin in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But we should be clear about what it does not do or claim to be. It is not a...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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