Book Reviews

Ellen Schrecker, ed. Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism. New York: The New Press, 2004. 346 pp. $27.95.

Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times

The Cold War has been fertile territory for revisionist historians. Ever since William Appleman Williams declared that the United States, not the Soviet Union, was the ag-

gressor, revisionists have portrayed themselves as dissidents bravely protesting Cold Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/8/1/150/696349/jcws.2006.8.1.150.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 War orthodoxies. During the , revisionism reached full ºower, prompt- ing historians to treat seriously the notion that the United States might have triggered the Cold War. By the 1980s, revisionism had itself become a kind of orthodoxy. The collapse of the Soviet empire, far from inducing circumspection among revisionists, has prompted them to conclude that right-wing ideologues, including William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, have concocted a conservative triumphalist version of his- tory that has culminated in President George W. Bush’s attempt to create a U.S. em- pire. At least this is what the revisionist contributors to Ellen Schrecker’s volume Cold War Triumphalism appear to believe. Revisionism is central to the historical enterprise. Each generation draws its own conclusions about the causes of war and revolution in previous decades and centuries. But it is hard to avoid the sense that Schrecker and other contributors are not really revising their own views. Instead, much like the con- servatives they criticize and condemn, they are mired in past controversies. Schrecker scores some good points in outlining the conservative catechism of the Cold War in which single-handedly destroyed the Soviet empire. As she notes, the dissidents in Eastern Europe and the immiseration of the Soviet empire did more to bring about the demise of Communism than did any U.S. actions. But she goes badly astray in declaring that today “an undemanding patriotic celebration prevails, glorifying Washington’s past actions in order to justify its present ones”(p. 2). What patriotic celebration is Schrecker referring to? By and large, the Cold War has slipped off the political radar screen, supplanted by the war against terrorism. The for- eign policy doctrines enunciated by the Bush administration, including preemptive war, have little to do with memories of the Cold War. In addition, Schrecker indulges in the hoary myth that the United States, like the Soviet Union, relied on a bogus conºict to control its population. Then there is Michael A. Bernstein’s exceptionally well-written essay on the Cold War economy. Reviving standard Marxist theories of imperialism, Bernstein asserts but does not prove a connection between U.S. capitalism and wars of aggression abroad. The United States, Bernstein contends, has seen conservatives “justify the transformation of the doctrine, from an ostensibly defensive foundation to an increasingly aggressive effort to secure the fortunes of the world for American capital” (p. 144). For American capital? Many U.S. businesses have been exceedingly wary of the war, fearful of the economic fallout in Europe and disruptions in the oil supply. Bernstein would have helped his argument if he could have demonstrated a

150 Book Reviews link between Bush’s proclamation of a fundamentally new foreign policy and eco- nomic elites. The most stimulating essay comes from Leo P. Ribuffo, who contrasts Reinhold Niebuhr, William Appleman Williams, and . Although Niebuhr has largely been forgotten, he, together with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., played a key role in creating what became known as the vital center in the late 1940s. Ribuffo main- tains that few observers attempted to rely on consistent moral arguments as opposed

to moral judgments when discussing the Cold war, but that this triumvirate, in vary- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/8/1/150/696349/jcws.2006.8.1.150.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 ing ways, tried to devise such arguments. In the 1930s, Niebuhr was sympathetic to Marxist doctrine, describing himself as a socialist Christian. By 1940, he embraced New Deal liberalism en route to be- coming a Cold War liberal. Niebuhr sketched out a sensible path between U.S. self- righteousness and ºaccidity in confronting what was a very real Communist threat abroad. Williams, by contrast, shunned Cold War liberalism. He did not believe that the United States was inherently evil, as later revisionists would assert, but that it had been beguiled by the temptations of “empire” and glory. Williams correctly dismissed the notion that the United States had ever really been an isolationist country. But he ended up providing his own cartoon of U.S. history in which even the Founding Fa- thers were militant imperialists. Williams wanted the United States to rely not on mil- itary strength but on the power of its ideals. According to Ribuffo, “Williams’s per- sonal vision of utopia consisted of a community in which citizens engaged in honest dialogue . . . and, he hoped, decided on socialist solutions” (p. 39). The bête noire of the revisionists is, of course, John Lewis Gaddis. Gaddis’s close archival work has made him perhaps the leading historian of the Cold War. But Gaddis, Ribuffo complains, “appears to have been craving an opportunity to afªrm Cold War orthodoxy for years” (p. 57). Certainly Gaddis began his career by splitting the difference between the revisionists and the proponents of the orthodox school. He argued that both the Soviet Union and the United States had been at fault for the Cold War. But, as Ribuffo correctly notes, Gaddis jettisoned any vestigial revisionist tendencies after 1989, calling for moral factors to be taken into account when judging the crimes of Josif Stalin and his successors. But Ribuffo indicts Gaddis for failing to recognize and appreciate the salience of Niebuhr’s warning that virtues such as spread- ing democracy can become vices when vigorously championed abroad. Ribuffo, Schrecker, and other contributors offer a spirited counter-blast to what they see as the latest Cold War orthodoxies. But in their zeal to tar Bush as simply the latest Cold War president, they muddle both the past and the present. A truly revi- sionist approach that would break new ground might focus on the role played by Ger- many and Japan in helping to convince Soviet leaders that trying to surpass the West was a hopeless task. Instead, this volume substitutes clichés for insight by rehashing one side of the sterile debate about the U.S. role in the Cold War.

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