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The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World, by Derek Leebaert
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The Fifty-Year Wound is the first cohesively integrated history of the Cold War, one replete with important lessons for today. Drawing upon literature, strategy, biography, and economics -- plus an inside perspective from the intelligence community -- Derek Leebaert explores what Americans sacrificed at the same time that they achieved the longest great-power peace since Rome fell. Why did they commit so much in wealth and opportunity with so little sustained complaint? Why did the conflict drag on for decades? What did the Cold War do to the country, and how? What was lost while victory was gained? Leebaert has uncovered an astonishing array of never-published documents and information, including major revelations about American covert operations and Soviet military activities. He has found, in the shadows of one of this century's great, epic stories, the sort of details and explanations that hit with the force of a lightning bolt and will change forever the way we think about our past.
- Sales Rank: #1363192 in Books
- Published on: 2003-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.25" w x 5.50" l, 1.50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 784 pages
Amazon.com Review
America won the cold war, what Derek Leebaert calls a "muffled world war" in The Fifty-Year Wound, but the cost of victory--psychically, morally, and financially--was beyond frightful. The Soviet Union collapsed peacefully; civilization survived "more or less" intact; the world was "liberalized," and the cold war period was the longest "great power" peace since Rome fell. But a half-century "pattern of alarm" and the "industry of national security" curbed freedoms, diverted talent into "fundamentally unproductive" fields, postponed research, "trammeled" investment, and caused a national "waste of spirit." As well, Leebaert suggests the Cuban missiles were primarily psychological threats; American involvement in Vietnam led to OPEC's economic muscle; Kennedy was perhaps the most hawkish of post-WWII presidents, and that the events of September 11 were a direct cold war legacy. This massive, comprehensive, and stern but guardedly optimistic overview will reward the determined reader with its insights and hundreds of telling, sometimes shocking, details. --H. O'Billovitch
From Publishers Weekly
Leebaert, a founding editor of the journal International Security and lecturer in government at Georgetown, recalls how Paul Nitze, a long-time Cold Warrior, said at the turn of the 21st century that "we did a goddamn good job" with the Cold War. Leebaert answers that assessment in his sure-to-be-controversial and riveting book, in which heretofore unpublished documents and new analyses combine to create a lucid, balanced and in-depth study of the issue. "Well," Leebaert writes, "yes and no: yes if the overriding emphasis is that civilization survived more or less intact, that the Soviet Union collapsed peacefully, and that most of the world was liberalized along the way; no if we dwell on the indirection, inexcusable ignorance, political intrusions, personal opportunism, and crimes underlying this ultimate victory." What, in other words, did we lose in order to win?After relatively few pages outlining the postwar crises and confrontations up to 1950 and the Korean War, Leebaert begins what becomes a brilliant and highly quotable examination of what went right and what went wrong mostly wrong, he argues as the U.S. went from containment of a virulent and ominous U.S.S.R. to abetting its collapse. According to Leebaert, the often astonishing history of our recent past has numerous villains the CIA, the Pentagon, "systems analysis" technicians, a greedy "scientific and technological elite" and what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial-congressional complex." But Ike himself is one of Leebaert's heroes, as are Truman, Marshall and Reagan (he credits the latter with accelerating the end of the Cold War). Others, such as Kennedy and Nixon, get rough treatment (for them, the presidency was "a means for displaying planetary ambitions"), as do political gurus such as Kennan and Kissinger. America had to face down the Soviets almost alone, hindered, Leebaert asserts, by the rapaciousness of the OPEC nations and the self-interest of not only the rebuilding Japan, but of France and Britain as well. He considers the Korean War to have been "the detonator that blew U.S. power around the world" and that ended any chance of post-WWII American isolationism; the Chernobyl disaster,he contends, symbolized the Soviet empire's long slide into ineptitude and paralysis. His claim, however, that the greatest Cold War nuclear crisis came not from missiles in Cuba during the Kennedy years, but from the paranoid and disintegrating Andropov in 1983, will raise some eyebrows. Much happened in the 50 years that was "harmful to American life," Leebaert writes, and many of those costs emerge as frighteningly high in this analysis. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
We won the Cold War, but at what cost? Going beyond the traditional diplomatic history of scholars like John Lewis Gaddis (We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford Univ., 1998. rev. ed.) and recalling H.W. Brands's The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (Oxford Univ., 1994. reprint), Leebaert, who teaches government at Georgetown University and has written previously on Soviet military strategy, has used both primary and secondary sources to craft a new synthesis of America's 50-year dance with the Soviet Union. He shows how after World War II American leadership became fixated on maintaining a strong military capacity while struggling to create sustained growth at home. He considers what America would have been like if those trillions of dollars spent on the Cold War as well as the attention of the best minds of two generations had been directed toward improving the social and cultural condition of the American people. In the most important work on the Cold War to come out in years, Leebaert makes us contemplate what we lost while winning the Cold War. Highly recommended for all collections. Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
A Breath of Sanity--Hard Look at Cost of Cold War
By Robert David STEELE Vivas
This is an extraordinary book, in part because it forces us to confront the "hangover" effects of the Cold War as we begin an uncertain path into the post 9-11 future. It begins by emphasizing that the Cold War glorified certain types of institutions, personalities, and attitudes, and ends by pointing out that we paid a very heavy cost--much as General and President Eisenhower tried to warn us--in permitting our society to be bound by weaponry, ideology, and secrecy.
Two quotes, one from the beginning, one from the end, capture all that lies in between, well-documented and I would add--contrary to some opinions--coherent and understandable.
"For the United States, the price of victory goes far beyond the dollars spend on warheads, foreign aid, soldiers, propaganda, and intelligence. It includes, for instance, time wasted, talent misdirected, secrecy imposed, and confidence impaired. Particular costs were imposed on industry, science, and the universities. Trade was distorted and growth impeded." (page xi)
"CIA world-order men whose intrigues more often than not started at the incompetent and went down from there, White House claims of 'national security' to conceal deceit, and the creation of huge special interests in archaic spending all too easily occurred because most Americans were not preoccupied with the struggle." (page 643)
Although the author did not consult the most recent intelligence reform books (e.g. Berkowitz, Johnson, Treverton, inter alia), he is consistently detailed and scathing in his review of intelligence blunders and the costs of secrecy--in this he appears to very ably collaborate the findings of Daniel Ellsberg's more narrowly focused book on "SECRETS: A Memoire of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers." He points out, among many many examples, that despite Andropov's having been head of the KGB for fifteen years, at the end of it CIA still did not know if Andropov has a wife or spoke English. He also has a lovely contrast between how little was learned using very expensive national technical means (secret satellites) and open sources: "So much failure could have been avoided if CIA has done more careful homework during the 1950s in the run-up to Sputnik; during the 1960s, when Sovieet marshals were openly publishing their thoughts on nuclear strategy; or during the 1970s and 1980s, when stagnation could be chronicled in the unclassified gray pages of Soviet print. Most expensively, the CIA hardly ever learned anything from its mistakes, largely because it would not admit them." (pages 567-568).
The author's biographic information does not include any reference to military service, but footnote 110 suggests that he was at least in Officer Candidate School with the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam era. The biography, limited to the inside back jacket flap, also avoids discussing the author's considerable experience with information technology. Given the importance of this critique of all that most Republicans and most 50-70 year olds hold very sacred, we need to more about the man goring the ox. Future editions should have a much expanded biography.
Bottom line: America muddled through the Cold War, made many costly mistakes, and developed a policy-making process that is, to this day, largely uninformed due to a lack of a comprehensive global intelligence capability, or a sufficient means of consulting diverse experts (as opposed to the in-town intellectual harlots). If ever we needed a clean-sheet look at how we make policy and how we provide decision-support to that policy process, this is the time. The "fifty-year wound" is still open, and the author warns us it will not heal without a reappraisal of how we do the business of national security.
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
important story-poorly told
By Stephen M. Picca MD
Without understanding the hisory of the cold war you cannot make any sense out of the present state of the nation or of current events such as the disaster of Sept.11. This book attempts to give an overview of this enourmous subject from the end of WWII up until today. It is well referenced and informative and many non-historians would benefit from reading it. The main problem is that the writing is terrible. It reads like a first draft of a book that the author did not have the time or interest to craft into a real book. As such it is simultaneously interesting, informative and frustrating to read.
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
An Engaging Mess
By Brandon Chitwood
Considering the author's weighted interest toward technology and business, it is surprising how well much of this book reads. It is nothing if not quotable, brimming with insight-packed sentences and entertaining character sketches. Leebaert definitely knows his stuff: this doorstop-worthy tome is loaded with information.
Perhaps too much information. The main flaw of the book is its rather bogus thesis: The Cold War was filled with "costs." Yes, I suppose any forty year endeavor would be filled with its share of expenditures, many mistaken, but this is hardly the most enlightening point to make about the superpower conflict. Unfortunately, it is Leebaert's point, and he desperately tries to tie every nugget of info he tosses at the reader into his great theme. Every chapter, no matter how diffuse the subjects covered, is rounded off with a monotonously pedestrian "these mistakes could have been avoided" conclusion a harried undergraduate would have been ashamed to employ.
Many of Leebaert's mini-analyses of various arenas of the conflict are fascinating: his emphasis on the economic and technological subplots of the Cold War are particularly insightful. But the attempt to weave these analyses into an overarching narrative ultimately undo much of the coherence of the book. His appraisal of many of the power players in the struggle often come across as bitchy or unfair (as he spends little time examining the reasons for their actions, but nonetheless tallying their "mistakes" to play up his theme).
Another problem is that many of his assessments come to contradict each other: while showing how the Soviets ground their economy into the ground preparing for a "winnable" nuclear pre-emptive strike, Leebaert condemns the US "mandarinate" for advocating the essentially common sense theory of mutual assured destruction, rather than dangerously aping the Soviets in constructing ABM defenses (which, Leebaert refrains from explaining, are built to fire nuclear weapons at incoming ICBMs in the atmosphere. In which case, a city will suffer double the number of thermonuclear airbursts it would without the defense. The ABM Treaty of 1972, which the author does not hide his disdain for, was set up with the understanding that MORE offensive nuclear weapons around cities does not constitute a "defense," but rather, a furthering of an offensive arms race. Later in the book, it appears that Leebaert's ambiguous attraction to the SDI program has influenced his judgement). At various times, weapons build-ups are deemed wasteful, or necessary, depending on Leebaert's opinion of the administration calling for the build-up. JFK's triumphalism is derided as reckless, Ronald Reagan's is applauded as decicive---though the author considers the Soviet war scare of 1983, which Reagan's rhetoric precipitated, the most dangerous time of the Cold War. The ambiguities and inconsistencies in Leebaert's assessments need more development to explain them, but, given the scope of the work, the reader is usually left with a stream of brief anecdotes.
These contradictions, along with a thesis so broad as to be practically meaningless, often make the reader pause and wonder if the author has not taken on more than he can handle. A reader looking for a clear, introductory narrative of the period is advised to look elsewhere (Martin Walker's book is quite good). But for Cold War nuts looking for an engaging new spin on familiar material, as well as a deeper appreciation of the less-reported aspects of this apocalyptic time, this is a good addition to the literature.
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