An Analysis of
John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know Rethinking Cold War History
Scott Gilfillan with Jason Xidias
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[email protected] Cover illustration: Etienne Gilfillan
Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN 978-1-912302-56-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-912128-13-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-912281-44-2 (e-book) Notice The information in this book is designed to orientate readers of the work under analysis, to elucidate and contextualise its key ideas and themes, and to aid in the development of critical thinking skills. It is not meant to be used, nor should it be used, as a substitute for original thinking or in place of original writing or research. References and notes are provided for informational purposes and their presence does not constitute endorsement of the information or opinions therein. This book is presented solely for educational purposes. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged to provide any scholarly advice. The publisher has made every effort to ensure that this book is accurate and up-to-date, but makes no warranties or representations with regard to the completeness or reliability of the information it contains. The information and the opinions provided herein are not guaranteed or warranted to produce particular results and may not be suitable for students of every ability. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, damage or disruption arising from any errors or omissions, or from the use of this book, including, but not limited to, special, incidental, consequential or other damages caused, or alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by the information contained within.
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CONTENTS WAYS IN TO THE TEXT Who Is John Lewis Gaddis? 9 What Does We Now Know Say? 10 Why Does We Now Know Matter? 12 SECTION 1: INFLUENCES Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context Module 2: Academic Context Module 3: The Problem Module 4: The Author’s Contribution
15 19 23 27
SECTION 2: IDEAS Module 5: Main Ideas 32 Module 6: Secondary Ideas 37 Module 7: Achievement 42 Module 8: Place in the Author’s Work 46 SECTION 3: IMPACT Module 9: The First Responses Module 10: The Evolving Debate Module 11: Impact and Influence Today Module 12: Where Next?
Glossary of Terms People Mentioned in the Text Works Cited
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51 55 59 63 68 72 76
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CRITICAL THINKING AND WE NOW KNOW Primary critical thinking skill: EVALUATION Secondary critical thinking skill: INTERPRETATION John Lewis Gaddis had written four previous books on the Cold War by the time he published We Now Know – so the main thrust of his new work was not so much to present new arguments as to re-examine old ones in the light of new evidence that began emerging from behind the Iron Curtain after 1990. In this respect, We Now Know can be seen as an important exercise in evaluation; Gaddis not only undertook to reassess his own positions – arguing that this was the only intellectually honest course open to him in such changing circumstances – but also took the opportunity to address criticisms of his early works, not least by post-revisionist historians. The straightforwardness and flexibility that Gaddis exhibited in consequence enhanced his book’s authority. He also deployed interpretative skills to help him revise his methodology and reinterpret key historical arguments, integrating new, comparative histories of the Cold War era into his broader argument.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL WORK Born in the US state of Texas in 1941, John Lewis Gaddis is a prolific author, a respected academic, and a renowned Cold War expert. He has held professorships at the prestigious universities of Oxford,Yale, and Princeton, and won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of American historian and diplomat George Kennan. He is currently Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, and has been awarded the National Humanities Medal for deepening America’s understanding of the humanities.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF THE ANALYSIS Scott Gilfillan is a doctoral candidate in international history at the London School of Economics Dr Jason Xidias holds a PhD in European Politics from King’s College London, where he completed a comparative dissertation on immigration and citizenship in Britain and France. He was also a Visiting Fellow in European Politics at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is Lecturer in Political Science at New York University.
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WAYS IN TO THE TEXT KEY POINTS • John Lewis Gaddis is one of the most important historians on the subject of the Cold War*—a period of tension between the Soviet Union* and the United States, and countries aligned with each, in the years 1947 to 1991. • We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, published in 1997, discusses the causes of the Cold War, its structure, how it developed, and its place in international history. • Gaddis’s main argument is that both the United States and the Soviet Union became empires* after 1945; the difference between them was that the United States ruled other nations by consent while the Soviet Union ruled by coercion. He accuses the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin* of making the Cold War drag on.
Who Is John Lewis Gaddis? John Lewis Gaddis, the author of We Now Know (1997), is one of the most important experts on the subject of the Cold War. He was born in the city of Cotulla, Texas in 1941, and received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1968. After earning his doctorate, he taught at Indiana University Southeast before working at Ohio University from 1969 to 1997. He then moved on to Yale University,
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Macat Analysis of John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know
where he became Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, a position he still holds today. Gaddis has also held visiting professorships at the Naval War College, Oxford University, and Princeton University. Gaddis’s books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972), Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security (1982), The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987), and The Cold War (2005). He also wrote the official biography of the American historian and diplomat George Kennan,* for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the American History Book Prize in 2012. Gaddis explains in the book’s preface that We Now Know came from a series of eight lectures he gave at Oxford University in 1992 while spending a year there as a visiting professor. For Gaddis, it was a fascinating time to be involved in Cold War research, as the period had only just come to an end:“This was the first full year of what everyone agreed was the post-Cold War era,” he said,“and, as a consequence, my first opportunity to lecture on the Cold War from beginning to end.”1 What Does We Now Know Say? John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know looks at our historical understanding of the Cold War from a new, international perspective. The main goal of the text is to show readers that new documentary evidence from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China has changed the historiography* of the Cold War—that is, the way histories of the Cold War have been written. Gaddis argues that these new documents have to be taken into account if you want to explain the Cold War as international history. He calls this “new Cold War history.”2 This new historiographical approach, he says, means we can now answer questions such as: Who started the Cold War? Why did it escalate? Why did it last so long? And why did it end?
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Ways In to the Text
The main ideas in We Now Know spring from the opportunity created by the appearance of the new source material. Gaddis argues in the text that such new documentary evidence obliged historians to revisit many of the traditional arguments about the Cold War and to compare materials from everywhere to get a new, international, view of the period’s history. Gaddis’s new way of looking at the Cold War all leads to the book’s last chapter, “The New Cold War History: First Impressions,” which sums up the text’s key ideas. In eight short hypotheses about “what we now know,” representing a significant departure from his previous understanding of Cold War history, Gaddis condenses all the points on specific Cold War events that he covers in the previous nine chapters. During the 1970s and 1980s, Gaddis had become a well-known member of the post-revisionist* school of Cold War history. Postrevisionist historians wanted to go beyond the usual arguments about the origins of the Cold War towards interpretations that stressed the importance of geopolitics*—that is, politics influenced by geographical factors, such as where things are, what resources they have, the balances of power between nations, and so on. Gaddis had argued that the balance of power between the US and the Soviet Union as well as the focus on grand strategy*—that is, the strategic use of all the financial, diplomatic and cultural means open to a nation in pursuit of some aim—were both essential elements in US-Soviet policymaking and were responsible for making the Cold War last as long as it did. What Gaddis discovered when researching We Now Know forced him to rethink previous ideas.“The diversification of power did more to shape the course of the Cold War than did the balancing of power,”3 he argues in the book’s concluding chapter—by which he means that the Americans had built a democratic empire superior to the autocratic (that is, dictatorial and repressive) Soviet empire. He also concludes “that as long as Joseph Stalin was running the Soviet Union, a cold war was unavoidable.”4
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Macat Analysis of John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know
According to the Norwegian Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad, these ideas were “a return to some of the concerns—but not always the conclusions—of Cold War orthodoxy.”5 Gaddis did not expect his new theories, which contradicted his previous thought, to stay true forever, and he predicted that future histories would probably go on to challenge his “new Cold War history” as more evidence became available. Why Does We Now Know Matter? We Now Know argues that the new documentary evidence that had come from the former Soviet Union and its allies since the end of the Cold War changed how the conflict should be understood historically. The title of the book is important, as the main aim of We Now Know was to explain what “we”—that is, Gaddis and his readers—“now know” about the Cold War. The title was an invitation to readers to join Gaddis on a journey through the new history of the Cold War. The author’s interpretation of the new documents and evidence would make it clear what he believed people now knew about the Cold War (as opposed what people thought they knew before this evidence was available), why it started, how it escalated and why it went on for so long. When We Now Know was published, it was an exciting time for Cold War research. The consensus view was that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant an end to the Cold War, allowing the first histories of the entire period of conflict to be written. And, given the slew of new documents from the former Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe and China, researchers had the opportunity to write histories from a fully international perspective.This, of course, had a significant effect on both Gaddis’s decision to write We Now Know and on the conclusions that he came to—as he admits in the book’s preface, acknowledging the debt he owed to the work of other historians in the course of researching and writing his study.
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Ways In to the Text
We Now Know is a landmark work on the struggle for political and ideological supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union during the second half of the twentieth century. Looking at the conflict from its early beginnings through to the Cuban Missile Crisis* of October 1962 (the closest the Cold War came to a “hot” war fought with nuclear weapons), its use of newly available documents from both Western and communist nations and its novel interpretation of events establish it as a key work of so-called “new Cold War history.”
NOTES 1 John Lewis Gaddis, What We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), preface, vii. 2 Gaddis, We Now Know, preface, viii. 3 Gaddis, We Now Know, 283. 4 Gaddis, We Now Know, 284–5, 292. 5 Odd Arne Westad, “Bibliographical Essay: The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 1: Origins, eds. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 509.
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