Volume 10, Number 2 · February 1, 1968
The Great Schism of Our Age
By A.J.P. Taylor
Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles 1918-1919
by Arno J. Mayer
Knopf, 918 pp., $15.00
It is generally supposed that the cold war started in 1945 or soon afterwards. Innumerable lectures, articles, and books have been devoted to its origins. By now it has become a stock question in examination papers at Universities, and students labor over the theme: 'Assess the origins of the Cold War.' There is no agreement about the answer. The orthodox hold that it was due to something which the Soviet government did in Poland, or maybe in Rumania. The heretics claim that it was provoked by President Truman's enthusiasm for the atom bomb. The skeptics insinuate that, like most public matters, it was a mutual muddle of misunderstanding. Despite these wide differences of interpretation, all the pundits have accepted without argument the belief that it is in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War that they must look for the explanation.
Review, 2526 words
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