The New York Times 20th Century in Review: The Cold War
PrefaceThe unfolding of past events, whether in our own lives or the lives of great nations, can appear logical and almost predictable when viewed from the present. The cold war is a case in point. Political scientists make a compelling argument that the decades-long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent China) was, to use their terminology, “overdetermined.” In other words, like a Greek tragedy, there was a certain inevitability to the clash and how it unfolded over time. These two giant, revolutionary states with competing ideologies and sprawling interests around the globe emerged from the ruins of World War II bound to quarrel. In retrospect, the Stalinization of Eastern Europe, the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO, Sputnik and the space race, the intractable dispute over Berlin, and even the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan appeared driven by unwritten but certain laws of modern international politics. Even the cold war’s end seemed scripted, as the side with the bankrupt ideology eventually collapsed under its own weight.
Fortunately, tracing the cold war’s development in the pages of The New York Times quickly cures you of this common but dangerous fallacy of historical determinism. These articles capture the immediacy, intensity and uncertainty of the conflict in a way no textbook can. Consider the dramatic events during the last week of October and first week of November 1956. On October 21, The New York Times led with the shocking headline, “Poles Report Firing on Russian Regiment to Prevent Its Entry From East Germany.” Six days later the paper detailed the spread of the revolt in Hungary, and the Soviets appeared, at least momentarily, unprepared to intervene. But days later, a new
event shared the headline–an Israeli attack into Egypt’s Suez region that was supported by the British and French.
This was a key moment of the cold war. Reading these articles today, one cannot help but ask the sort of “what-if” questions that make the past come alive. How would the Soviets have responded to the revolts in Eastern Europe if the Suez debacle had never taken place? How did the American presidential election, only days away, complicate deliberations in Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Cairo and Tel Aviv? We can never fully answer these types of questions, but the New York Times articles provide a hair-raising sense of the day-to-day, even hour-to-hour shifts that can alter international politics forever. Reading The Times from this period offers a greater sense of the
contingency, the danger, the possibility of different outcomes, than most histories written decades later could ever hope to convey.
That does not mean these articles can replace historical analysis. In fact, the articles are primary historical documents, revealing the prejudices, concerns, fears and ideologies of their time. Not far beneath the surface of the typically calm and sure prose, you sense the fear in the coverage of the North Korean invasion of the South, worried awe in descriptions of the Sputnik launch, outrage at the downing of KAL Flight 007 and anticipation and hope in any article describing a superpower summit. At times, even the calm and sure prose disappears, as with the almost shrill use of the term “Red” to describe any communist, regardless of national origin, well into the 1960s. One is impressed by the effort of most New York Times writers to obtain Archimedean
objectivity. Nevertheless, a critical examination of these articles provides students of the past with a window into the mentalities of the day.
The New York Times 20th Century in Review: The Cold War is laid out in nine sections, beginning with the final days of the First World War and ending 74 years later with President George Bush and President Boris Yeltsin declaring the formal end to the decades-long struggle. Though historians argue about when the cold war started, it is clear that America and Communist Russia were fascinated by each other years before their conflict began. This is why the first section, “Precursors to the Cold War: America and the Soviet Union Enter the World Stage,” details U.S.-Russian relations before the cold war even started. The New York Times covered America’s military involvement in the Russian civil war, as well as the Red scare within the United States. Throughout the 1930s, a certain myopia about the Soviet Union set in, both among elites in the country and The New York Times, and it is hard to find articles detailing the horrors of Joseph Stalin’s purges, collectivization and forced industrialization. But the paper did capture the growing specter of fascism and war in Europe and Asia. The spirit of cooperation and collaboration with “Uncle Joe” throughout battles and wartime conferences is covered in great detail.
What is most interesting about the period following the World War II is not that these two allies clashed so soon after the war’s end, but that they cooperated for as long as they did. This transition is captured in Part II, “From Alliance to Acrimony: The Origins of the Cold War.” Behind all the banner headlines proclaiming U.S.-Soviet wartime friendship, there were signs of trouble. On April 17, 1943, a small article detailing Poland’s request for an investigation into charges that the Soviets murdered Polish Army officers at Katyn Forest appeared. Sixteen months later, the article on the Warsaw revolt could not hide the Soviet refusal to aid the hapless rebels. Hope persisted
over reason at Yalta and even through Potsdam, as Americans and The New York Times convinced themselves that postwar cooperation could last. But speeches by two of the three wartime leaders–Stalin and Winston Churchill–during the winter months of 1946 dashed dwindling hopes. The next year saw the United States steel itself for the reality of the cold war with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the National Security Act.
Despite the charged rhetoric, the clash between the Soviets and Americans
seemed unlikely to break out in a shooting war in 1946 and 1947. But the character of the conflict began to shift ominously in 1948, starting with the Prague coup in February and intensifying with the Soviet blockade of Berlin in April. This is captured in Part III, “The Cold War Intensifies.” This risk of a hot war increased even further in the second half of 1949 through 1950, following the “fall” of China, the Soviet detonation of an atomic device, the start of McCarthyism and the North Korean invasion of the South. The United States was again at war, but a different kind of war from World War II, limited and far away, yet full of terrible danger. The unspeakable shock at the intervention of “Red” China in the Korean War and the traumatic civil-military conflict caused by President Harry S. Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur shook the confidence of the country, a sentiment well captured in these articles. The reader can sense the growing desperation in the reports, as if there was a chance that the United States might stumble into a third world war that it could actually lose.
The election of the revered commander of D-Day as president of the United States, told in Part IV, “The Eisenhower Period,” began the slow process of easing the desperate sense of panic. The year 1953 witnessed the death of Stalin, the armistice in Korea and the beginning of the end of McCarthyism. There were crises during this
period, and the nuclear danger never seemed far away, but conflicts over Indochina, Guatemala, Lebanon and even the Taiwan Straight seemed unlikely to result in global war. There even appeared reason for hope, as the wartime allies managed to sign a treaty on Austria and both the Soviets and Americans traded various proposals to ease tensions. There were shocks, to be sure, including the Soviet crackdown in Hungary and the launching of Sputnik. But one had the sense that while cold war competition could last for decades longer, there was no reason to think it should lead inevitably to atomic Armageddon.
That growing sense of calm was ruptured on November 11, 1958, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded an end to the four-power occupation of Berlin. This incident initiated the terrifying period chronicled in Part V, “The Great Crises: Berlin, Cuba and Elsewhere.” Reading the articles from these years, it is often difficult to figure out what was real and what was theatre. The “Kitchen” debates between
Khrushchev and Vice-President Richard Nixon, the downing of an American U-2 reconnaissance plane, the failure of the Paris summit, the beginnings of the space race, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the series of Soviet ultimatums on Berlin–they were frightening, but weren’t there large elements of posturing in both the American and Soviet positions? That this was in fact a real clash, the closest the Soviets and Americans came to war, was confirmed in the summer of 1961 by the disastrous Vienna summit and then reaffirmed with President John F. Kennedy’s call for partial mobilization and Khrushchev’s decision to build the Berlin Wall. The tension rose as H-bomb testing resumed and a war of nerves broke out over Berlin. The confrontation culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, perhaps the most dangerous two weeks of the entire cold war.
The post-Missile-Crisis period, which should have seen decreased tension and increased American power, instead witnessed “Vietnam and American Retreat.” Perhaps even more interesting than what events The Times covered during this period was how
they were covered. The tone of the articles shifts, subtly and unmistakably, as doubts over the United States’ policies in Southeast Asia mushroomed. While Vietnam dominated the coverage, The Times followed many other critical stories, including the six-day Arab-Israeli war, the Glassboro superpower summit, China’s Cultural Revolution and the crushing of the Prague uprising by the Soviet Union.
Watergate dominates our memory of the Nixon and Ford period. But as Part VII, “Détente and Confrontation,” reveals, it was also a time of extraordinary movement in world politics. In West Germany, Chancellor Willy Brandt ushered in “Ostpolitik” with the East. The Bretton Woods international monetary system was upended, the Middle East exploded into war again, and India and Pakistan fought a quick but costly conflict. America finally extricated itself from Vietnam, but not before suffering tens of thousand more casualties and rending the domestic political scene still further. But the cold war entered a mature, less dangerous phase, as President Richard Nixon visited China and pursued arms control with the Soviets. The danger of superpower war receded.
Or so it seemed. The presidency of Jimmy Carter initially marked a move away from the harsh rhetoric of the cold war toward the more uplifting theme of human rights. But as Part VIII, “Cold War II” reveals, it was too soon to call the bipolar conflict over. The New York Times chronicled the deteriorating superpower relations, culminating in the brutal Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The 1980 election in the United States brought to power Ronald Reagan, a politician ideologically driven by a deep distrust of
communism and a fervent belief in the need to strengthen America’s defenses. The year 1983, like 1949, 1953 and 1962, marked one of the turning points of the cold war. Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil” in the modern world and two weeks later laid out his Strategic Defense Initiative to the world. Grenada was invaded, the United States pursued controversial policies throughout Latin America, and NATO deployed intermediate-range nuclear missiles despite widespread protests in Western Europe. The Soviets and Americans traded increasingly harsh invectives, and the world was given a fictional account of what a thermonuclear war might look like through ABC’s broadcast of “The Day After,” one of the most watched programs in television history.
Historians will long debate what caused the stunning changes chronicled in the final section, “The End of the Cold War.” But the articles included here convey two emotions felt universally during that period–great surprise and hope. The emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as a new type of Soviet leader and his dramatic summits with Reagan at Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow took the world by storm. But the real transformation of the cold war came later. In 1989, the most magical year of the cold war, Soviet soldiers left Afghanistan, Poland set free elections, Czechoslovakia chose
dissident playwright Vaclav Havel as its president, and the terrible symbol of the East-West divide in Europe, the Berlin Wall, was torn down. There were setbacks and dangers along the way, as China’s Communists ruthlessly put down protests and reactionary forces in Russia tried to halt the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But the suddenness and ease with which this terrible, decades-long conflict ended could never have been predicted.
I hope the articles I have selected will lure students of all ages into further exploring the history of the cold war, a terrifying conflict that dominated international politics and news coverage for almost half a century, and whose effects will be felt for years to come.
In closing, I would like to thank Andrew Erdmann of Harvard University and Shelly Reese of the University of Virginia for their help. I would like to offer particular thanks to the project’s research assistant, Christopher Freise of the University of Virginia, who provided indispensable assistance and advice on the book.
Dr. Francis J.Gavin
LBJ School of Public Affairs University of Texas at Austin
