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Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. How We Forgot the Cold War: Conservatives dominated the proceedings, spending millions to portray the conflict as a triumph of good over evil and a defeat of totalitarianism equal in significance to World War II. In this provocative book, historian Jon Wiener visits Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials across the United States to find out how the era is being remembered.
Lively, readable, and well-informed, this book expands current discussions about memory and history, and raises intriguing questions about popular skepticism toward official ideology.
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This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Mar 16, Nathan Albright rated it did not like it Shelves: The way this author goes on about progressives and insults the conservative view of the Cold War, which he oversimplifies and mischaracterizes, he should be called John Whiner. Having been familiar with this work, I was aware of the author's worldview, which brings discredit to any authority he cites including the New York Times and WaPo [1].
One thing to understand about this work is that many people reading this, if they can get through the nearly pages of fake leftist history, is that t The way this author goes on about progressives and insults the conservative view of the Cold War, which he oversimplifies and mischaracterizes, he should be called John Whiner. One thing to understand about this work is that many people reading this, if they can get through the nearly pages of fake leftist history, is that they will probably hope the author gets cancer or becomes sterile from all the radiation he experiences in traveling to various cold war monuments, many of which are related to dubious atomic projects and seek to reassure the public of their safety.
An example of the bogus worldview of the author is the way that his perspective triangulates between leftists fellow travelers like himself , liberals, and conservatives, which apparently is anyone remotely right of center--moderates are barely even mentioned in this account. When one's view is as far left as the John Birch Society is right, it is hard to have any useful political insights, and this book predictably suffers as a result of the author's whining over the cruel fate dished to the Hollywood 10 who refused to snitch on their fellow reds, and deserved a far more serious fate than they received.
The book consists of the author's tour around the country, roughly organized in a chronological fashion, with one exception, in that the author begins by positing a straw man argument for the other side and ends with various progressive sites, slanting the argument in his favor. The book is divided into five parts, looking at two sites that deal with the end--the Reagan Library and the abortive Victims of Communism museum, then goes back to sites connected to the beginning of the Cold War, the 's, the 's and after, and "alternative approaches" that include Rocky Flats, a leftist CNN Cold War retrospective, and the Harry Truman museum.
The author is such a cheerleader for his own view that it is impossible to take the writing seriously, given the fact that the author never fails to misrepresent the view of the American people concerning the Cold War and booster for his own particular bogus worldview. Indeed, the most important insight, and perhaps the only worthwhile aspect of this book, is the way that the author unintentionally reveals the mystery he searched for in vain across America. There are at least two reasons why Americans have largely forgotten the Cold War and have not viewed it with the same triumphalist spirit as the Civil War and World War II have been viewed.
For one, the United States has not tended to celebrate either wars that are draws War of , World War I, Korea or America's "small wars" of counterinsurgency. Related to this is the fact that once the Cold War was largely won on the large scale, it became a war of counterinsurgency between the forces of the Left like the author and patriotic Americans like those who elected our current president.
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When I was visiting, the only comment I heard on this exhibit was a woman complaining to her husband, "They said the wall here was real, but it's a fake!
As for the East German border guard, when I asked a couple of teenagers whether he looked "menacing" to them, they told me, "Not really. The wall text here declares, "From to , the Soviet goal was clear: The crimes of Communist regimes against civilians resulted in the deaths of million people.
President Reagan identified this as the essence of an 'evil empire,' yielding nothing but death and destruction where it comes to power. Reagan told them to do it, and they did. After Checkpoint Charlie comes a side gallery on the Cold War featuring a video in which Reagan says, "At my first presidential press conference, I said, 'They reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime.
Not only did this help prevent a one-world Soviet state; within a couple of years the Soviet Union itself collapsed. No less than Margaret Thatcher provides the conclusion to the video: Grenada gets its own very small display at the library. The wall text reads, "US rescues US medical students," next to a button labeled "Press button to learn more.
It was dedicated in by Reagan himself. The monument reads, "This plaque expresses the gratitude of the Grenadan people to the Forces from the United States of America and the Caribbean who sacrificed their lives in liberating Grenada in October The Cold War room at the Reagan Library is mostly empty because it's a side gallery on the walkway to what the library rightly bills as its biggest attraction, literally and figuratively: We are privileged to have this national treasure and honored by the trust the United States Air Force has placed in us to share it with the American people.
The Air Force One exhibit is completely apolitical. Bush, including Carter and Clinton-and thus is hardly a monument to Reagan's unique role in winning the Cold War, which is not mentioned. Instead, visitors learn that Reagan flew more miles in this plane than any other president and that it was in this plane that he "officially started the Daytona Beach, Florida, NASCAR race via phone. As for souvenirs of the Berlin Wall, the gift shop sells a paperweight with the inscription, "Mr. But it's only one of thirty-three "desk items" for sale.
Does Reagan really deserve credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union? It's true that there's "Mr. An uncompromising voice of freedom spoke-and totalitarianism crumbled. But what happened in Berlin in fact was something quite different. Chance, he says, played a huge part in bringing down the Berlin Wall; what happened was mostly an accident. It began when Hungary decided to open its border with Austria. East Germans thus for the first time had an exit route to the West, and tens of thousands departed every day.
East German leader, Egon Krenz, decided he had to do something to stem the tide; he concluded that, if travel to the West was not banned, East Germans would return after visiting. So he announced freedom of travel, to begin "immediately"-by which he meant the next day, with some kind of "appropriate" controls. But on November 9, , as soon as the announcement was made, East Germans headed for Checkpoint Charlie, where a border guard decided to open the gate.
What happened next is what we call "the fall of the Berlin Wall. Krenz called it a 'botch. Conservative writers claim that the fall of the wall was the result of a longer-term process, also instigated by Reagan: But these claims, as Sean Wilentz writes in The Age of Reagan, have "little credible evidence" to back them up. Moreover, the skyrocketing defense budget of the Reagan White House was based on "manifestly exaggerated estimates of the Soviet Union's military superiority," Wilentz writes, "which were later proved wrong.
The claim that Reagan's aggressive military budget and bellicose rhetoric forced Kremlin leaders to come to the bargaining table is equally unsupported by evidence. The change was the work of Gorbachev, who came to power in March Bush said pretty much the same thing on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead of praising Reagan, he gave credit to the Soviet leader.
He said his goal was "introducing greater stability" in the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. He said, "We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage. In private communications with Soviet leaders Reagan was even clearer. He wrote Gorbachev's predecessor, Konstatin Chernenko, in , "I have no higher goal than the establishment of a relationship between our two great nations characterized by constructive cooperation.
Differences in our political beliefs and in our perspectives on international problems should not be an obstacle to efforts aimed at strengthening peace and building a productive working relationship. As for the "Reagan Doctrine"-U. In the meantime the Reagan White House sent arms to the Contras, paid for with the proceeds from selling weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages-the "Iran-Contra Affair"-which did a lot more damage to the Reagan administration than it did to the USSR.
The library display on Iran-Contra says only that it happened "without his knowledge. The strongest case for the Reagan Doctrine leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union can be found in U. But even with that argument, two major problems arise.
First, support for the mujahadeen began before Reagan. It was started by the Carter administration-although the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta doesn't mention that. Second, and more important, that support wasn't significantly increased until , a year after Gorbachev had come to power and was already reversing Soviet policy and beginning withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the official premise of the Reagan Doctrine turned out to be faulty.
In its original formulation, antidemocratic left-wing regimes were described as incapable of change and thus required force to overthrow them, while antidemocratic right-wing regimes were described as open to peaceful transformation. But support for the right in Afghanistan led to a vicious civil war, the triumph of the Taliban, and the rise of Bin Laden, and the notion that regimes on the left could be changed only by military force was definitively disproven-by the case of the Soviet Union.
The greatest weakness at the Reagan Library concerns Reagan's meeting with Gorbachev in at Reykjavik, where the president proposed phasing out all "offensive" missiles. The exhibit in Simi Valley doesn't give the president the credit he deserves. Something monumental almost happened at Reykjavik. Reagan sincerely dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons. Eric Hobsbawm, perhaps the greatest left-wing historian of the twentieth century, writes that, at Reykjavik, Reagan's "simple-minded idealism broke through the unusually dense screen of ideologists, fanatics, careerists, desperados and professional warriors around him.
For practical purposes, Hobsbawm concludes, the Cold War ended at Reykjavik-and we should not "underestimate the contribution of President Reagan. More than thirty places in the United States in addition to the Reagan Library display segments of the Berlin Wall, and these displays present a stunningly wide range of interpretations: The Newseum in Washington, D. However, the Newseum claims it has the largest section of "unaltered" wall segments, as well as a real East German guard tower. The Kennedy Library in Boston has a segment of the Berlin Wall, because Kennedy went to the wall just after it was built and said, "Ich bin ein Berliner.