Editor's Note

Editor’s Note Editor’s Note To stay within our current annual page guidelines, this issue and the next issue (Spring 2004) are somewhat shorter than usual to make up for the previous (Fall 2003) issue, which went well over the normal page limit to accommodate the second of our three segments on “The Collapse of the Soviet Union.” To conserve space in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/6/1/1/695889/152039704772741560.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 this issue, I decided to defer publication of Part 2 of my article (“The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union”) until the Summer 2004 issue. I also decided to defer the publication of two other long articles until the Summer 2004 issue. Despite the need to shift things around, this issue does allow us to publish some of the articles and book reviews that I was anxious to have appear. The ªrst article in this issue, by Mitchell Lerner, draws on newly declassiªed ma- terials from Central and Eastern Europe to reassess the Pueblo crisis of 1968. The crisis began on 23 January 1968 when North Korean forces seized a U.S. intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, that was on patrol in international waters near the North Korean port of Wonsan. U.S. ofªcials assumed that North Korea had taken this step in collusion with the Soviet Union or possibly China. The Johnson administration privately urged the Soviet Union to compel North Korea to release the boat and its crew, but Soviet ofªcials responded that North Korea had acted on its own and that there was little they could do. The newly available documents bear out Moscow’s denials of responsi- bility. They indicate that North Korea captured the Pueblo without consulting or even informing the other Communist states beforehand, and that some Soviet leaders were worried that North Korea’s provocative behavior might lead to reprisals by Western countries against Soviet intelligence ships. Because U.S. ofªcials had wrongly believed that North Korea was merely acting as a stalking horse for the Soviet Union, they squandered several months trying to work out a solution through channels in Mos- cow. When the crisis ªnally was resolved in December 1968, the peculiar nature of the settlement indirectly conªrmed that North Korea from the outset had been acting independently. The second article, by Andreas Wenger, discusses the evolution of the North At- lantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the latter half of the 1960s, a period that was marked by severe tensions within the alliance. The decision by French President Charles de Gaulle to pull French forces out of NATO’s integrated military commands led to major adjustments by the fourteen other members of the alliance. Amid conºicting domestic and international pressures, the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany had to devise some way of balancing their military, economic, and political concerns. The reconªguration of NATO, as Wenger shows, required extensive and often nettlesome discussions among the allied states as well as prolonged debates Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 1–2 © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1 Editor’s Note within the U.S., British, and West German governments. Tensions stemming from the escalation of U.S. military operations in Vietnam signiªcantly complicated the sit- uation, as did the collapse of Ludwig Erhard’s government in Bonn and the emergence of a “grand coalition” government under Kurt Kiesinger. At any number of points the U.S.-led attempts to restructure NATO were nearly derailed. Nonetheless, through sustained consultations and vigorous efforts by the allied leaders to cope with their domestic constituencies, NATO managed to overcome the Gaullist challenge. The fourteen member-states other than France reafªrmed the military role of the alliance by Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/6/1/1/695889/152039704772741560.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 endorsing more equitable burden-sharing, joint nuclear planning (instead of a joint nuclear force), the maintenance of adequate levels of conventional forces, and a new military strategy of “ºexible response.” The political role of NATO, for all ªfteen members (including France), was expanded by the Harmel Report, a document that guided the alliance’s political strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet bloc through the rest of the Cold War. The third article in this issue, a review essay by James Critchlow, discusses the role of public diplomacy (short-wave radio broadcasting, bilateral exchanges, informational activities, and related programs) in U.S. Cold War strategy and the implications for U.S. foreign policy in the post–Cold War world. The point of departure for Critchlow’s essay is a new book by Yale Richmond, a retired foreign service ofªcer who helped oversee U.S.-Soviet exchanges during his many years of work for the U.S. government. Critchlow draws on the book to highlight the many valuable contribu- tions that public diplomacy made to U.S. relations with the Soviet bloc. The impor- tance of public diplomacy during the Cold War, Critchlow argues, provides important lessons for the post–Cold War era. He suggests numerous ways of using informational programs, exchanges, and related activities to supplement U.S. military efforts against terrorists and rogue states. The fourth article, a review essay by Jeffrey Vanke, traces the ºawed career of Georges Marchais, whose two decades as leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the 1970s and 1980s witnessed a sharp decline in the party’s electoral for- tunes. In reviewing a new biography of Marchais by the French journalist Thomas Hofnung, Vanke points out that the PCF’s share of the vote dropped from roughly 21 percent to only about 9 percent during Marchais’s tenure. When Marchais was on his way to the top, he displayed shrewd political instincts, but once he became leader of the PCF he gradually lost his touch and made a number of serious missteps. In par- ticular he was consistently outºanked by his leftist rival, François Mitterand, the So- cialist Party leader who served two terms as French president while the PCF lan- guished on the outside. Marchais’s endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 symbolized how far the PCF still had to go before it could aspire to a share of power. Not until after the Cold War was over, and Marchais was on his death- bed, did the party ªnally move close enough to the mainstream to be accepted (ini- tially with three cabinet posts) into the French government. The articles and review essays are followed by an abridged section of shorter book reviews. 2.

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