Did Reagan Win the Cold War?

Salon.Com Books

John Lewis Gaddis' history succinctly captures the long face off that shaped our world. But his analysis is marred by Reagan worship.

By Laura Miller

Jan. 25, 2006 Like the fashions of the late 1980s, the Cold War is a phenomenon both too recent to have retro appeal and too distant to strike anyone as relevant. We rarely talk about it or what it meant; it won't quite come into focus. When John Lewis Gaddis, a history professor and expert on the conflict, teaches Yale undergraduates about the Cold War, "hardly any of them remember any of the events I'm describing." His students, he reports, "have very little sense of how the Cold War started, what it was about or why it ended in the way that it did." A worldview and way of life that once seemed permanent have melted away.

But the Cold War is still with us. It shaped the world we live in and lies coiled at the roots of most of the international problems we face today. Bits and pieces of its legacy turn up regularly in the course of current political debates like the outmoded yet indestructible junk of a geopolitical yard sale. I recently overheard a scornful college student in a cafe explaining to a friend that the CIA used to supply arms to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1970s. And then there's the famous photograph, snapped in Baghdad in 1983, of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. All the flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War.

More: http://salon.com/books/review/2006/01/25/gaddis/