Volume 10, Number 8 · April 25, 1968
The Thaw
By Andrew Kopkind
There is a cord which is strung from the winter of 1948 until now, and along it hang the politics, the events, and the personalities of one long cold season of history. The length of span is far less than an epoch and still greater than a generation, and one day the period may seem to be not much more than a journalistic conception: the 'Cold War decades.' But now people have been seized with the sense (it is as vague as that) that the strands have come together and the cord is somehow complete. It is only when such periods end that we can begin to describe them (and much later to define them), for only in their endings do their beginnings make sense. For Czechoslovakia, the sending-down of Novotny seems to complete a course which began with the throwing-out of Masaryk twenty years before, even if what will follow remains unclear. For the US, there is stark symmetry between the election of Truman and the abdication of Johnson; the formation of the Cold War coalition in the Democratic Party in 1948 gains an essential clarity of relief against its dissolution in 1968.
Feature, 3353 words
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